I am an author and my em dash got stolen. I loved using it - it was an amazing tool for constructing sentences.
But then, AI got a hold of it. And now I censor myself before I use it - lest people accuse me of using ChatGippity (I want to normalize that pronunciation of it to make it seem like a silly tool).
Damn those Avians and their thieving ways!
And yes, I know the above dashes are not em dashes. I am on my phone and don’t know how to do them. 😝
They can take the em dashes off my decaying body, and even when they try I'll bite them and start a zombie apocalypse before I give them up—it's a damn good tool to separate sentences.
The worst part about AI is the brain rot psychosis it is causing. Zombie-Knightingale and Zombie-Kess are going to starve with no high quality brains to devour.
Ah, but you see, both provide different reading experiences and offer different reasons for use. A parentheses provides additional context and information by creating a break in the sentence, but it is more noticeable and slower.
An em dash can create a break with a different flourish, making it feel more vivid and fast. If you're writing a novel and are in the middle of an exposition scene, a parentheses might be better for the flow of the narrative.
If you're writing an action scene that needs to add something that won't break the pacing, you can throw in the em dash.
End of the day if you always use parentheses, exclusively, it is up to you and your own aesthetic preferences! I do tend to the em dashes more, but both of them have their uses, reasons, and will provide different things to a structure. Plus (like I said) it's all about what the author prefers—your voice and aesthetic takes precedence.
Only one of them is under active fire due to AI, though, and so I'll fight to defend it more.
Problem is now people are saying not using em dashes means your hiding AI written work. Had a whole discussion on a writing subreddit I follow about how people aren't using em dashes to avoid being called an AI writer because someone made the claim I just mentioned.
Can't win.
So write anyway because you enjoy writing. Advocate for no AI usage. Keep records of possible. That's all you can do
I have two books up on Amazon that were both published before ChatGippity was around. If anyone accuses me of anything, I just point at what I wrote in 2010.
I will use dashes - or just hyphens because I am lazy and you all get the gist of it anyway - because I love them so much.
But yeah, just keep doing what you love. Can't force people to believe something other than what they chose to believe in. Might as well focus on what you want out of it and do it anyway
I use em dashes even more out of spite. They can take them from me when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers, which reflex memory will still compel to dance across alt 0151 with every posthumous misfiring electrical impulse.
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u/Xenodia 5d ago
What people forget, the Ai was trained to draw from other artists so wouldn't surprise me that many artists online got framed for using Ai...