« Felipe Antolinez »

Hyphens and Dashes

With AI tools becoming widely adopted, em-dashes have become a telltale sign of AI-generated content. Claude and ChatGPT seem to love them, which is unfortunate, because it’s now made everyone suspicious of a perfectly good punctuation mark. But this doesn’t change the fact that most people (non-native and native English speakers alike) never learned or understood the difference between hyphens (-), en-dashes (–), and em-dashes (—) in the first place. I now frequently see correct usage (AI-generated) and incorrect usage mixed in the same document, which happens when people do not understand the difference and revise a piece of AI-generated text.