Beehiiv is where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
10th June 2025
So, let’s get straight to it — I am a loyal and fervent user of the em dash — and nothing — not even AI’s over-use of it — will ever wean me off my favourite punctuation mark. (I’ve over-egged the pudding there, using four in rapid succession, just to make a point.)
Opinion is raging across the internet, with an increasing consensus that frequent appearances of the em dash in a piece of text are one of the telltale signs that point to it having been compiled by AI, rather than written by a human. (I won’t dignify what AI does as writing, no more than I would say a picture AI produced had been drawn, or that a piece of music AI assembled had been composed. These doing verbs are intrinsically human verbs, verbs of thought and sensibility. AI has no right to be dignified with verbs that suggest it is capable of such nuanced actions, when at best it can only simulate them.)
Don’t get me wrong — sometimes the em dash can be a conspicuous red flag about AI use, and a revealing, exposing one at that. Beware the reference or testimonial that abounds with em dashes: chances are the person you asked to write it has outsourced saying something genuine and personal about you to a machine that does not and cannot know you, so make of the value of such a statement (and such a relationship) what you will.
(Likewise, if the phrase “I’d work with X again in a heartbeat!” crops up near the end, you may well be scenting the touch of AI on the air. It’s just like the over-reliance on the word “beloved” in editorials compiled by AI; because AI has picked up on how much lazy humans love falling back on clichés, it quite naturally gives us what it infers we want to hear.)
I found a corking article on Substack, “A Brief History of the Em Dash” by Thao Thai on her Wallflower Chats thread, and I strenuously encourage you to read it, which will also discourage me from repeating things she says here. I don’t agree with everything she says, mind — Thai prefers not to put spaces either side of an em dash — but for the most part, I’m very much on her wavelength. (She’d have typed the first part of this sentence as “I don’t agree with everything she says, mind—Thai prefers not to put spaces either side of an em dash—but for the most part, I’m very much on her wavelength”. I’m a proud spacer — it just feels instinctively right to do that.)
I never knew, but really should have, that the em dash (—) and its smaller sibling the en dash (-) are so named because of their comparable width to the “m” and “n” in a typesetter’s box of movable type letters from the days when that’s how anything got printed. I’m firmly with Thai in having no use for the en dash, except as a functional hyphen in compound words that require one. It serves no kind of narrative purpose for me, carries no weight at all in indicating feeling or mood or intention. Ah, but the em dash… That precious baby is just THE BEST.
I use it so often that I’ve got a shortcut set up on my keyboard so I can reach for one whenever I want — Shift + Option + -, pressed all at the same time, in case you were wondering. (See: the en dash key DOES have a use after all.)
I’ve recently finished typing up the draft of Obsolete Constellations and predictably, that draft is full of em dashes. I’ve flashed through all 680 pages of it to see what patterns recur in how I deploy them:
1: A mid-sentence digression, when I pull the reader’s attention slightly away from the main thought to tell them something relevant that they need to know RIGHT NOW before they return to the main thought again. (I wouldn’t use brackets to fulfil this function instead — a bracket doesn’t feel like it quite mirrors the refocusing of thought that I’m trying to achieve.)
2: In narrative, I use it as the equivalent of an intake of breath before continuing or completing a thought; when I have a speaker do it, it’s usually when they want to give a discreet added emphasis to whatever they’re about to say next, or even them forcing themselves to correct or qualify a thought, for their listener or just for themselves. A weedy little en dash is wholly inadequate at marking out such a potent pause. The em dash, by contrast, stops the breath for long enough to really SUGGEST something.
3: It’s my default mark for when someone gets cut off mid-sentence, or when someone stops themselves mid-sentence. Again, a short en dash simply wouldn’t achieve that abrupt effect; the length of the em dash perfectly captures that sense of something lying beyond the cut-off point which we do not immediately (or ever) get to hear.
4: I’m fond of interrupting characters’ speech to make some quick qualifying comment, perhaps to let the reader in on something physical or visual that happens during the speech which adds an extra dimension of understanding or richness to what’s going on.
I’ll offer a really simple, quick example from Obsolete Constellations to demonstrate Points 3 and 4 combined: Zaff, one of my main characters, is at the baggage scanner before he flies off to his home planet, and Loncraine, my other main character, has secreted something in his bag: an ULDOG, or ultra-long-distance orgasm generator, wrapped in a rolled-up T-shirt. The official who is operating the scanner finds the T-shirt, unrolls it, and the ULDOG lands on the counter. Zaff sees it and says:
“That belongs to—” — the briefest of stumbles, his red face flushing even redder — “a friend of mine. I must have picked it up by mistake.”
Zaff doesn’t want to acknowledge what the provocative object is, or say anything about who he got it from or what the context between them is. (Zaff and Loncraine haven’t used the ULDOG together by this point, but they do a chapter later.) Two em dashes in the space of an eleven-word phrase, the belt and braces approach, allow me to start turning up the volume on Zaff’s embarrassment and distress here, in ways that just wouldn’t be possible with brackets, en dashes, three little dots, or anything else.
5: I also use one, centred, whenever I want to mark significant changes of time and/or place between sections within chapters. A tilde (~), the little mark familiar in Spanish and Portuguese for turning “n” into “ny” or nasalising “a” and “o” sounds, would fulfil this function pleasingly enough, but it always feels a bit too florid, a bit too attention-seeking as a section divider. The em dash is, by contrast, elegant in its restraint.
There’ll be more applications, I’m sure, but these are the ones I am most aware of. I suspect everyone who creates things has their own favourite fallbacks for achieving desired effects within their own work. A beloved chord or note pattern in music; a beloved brush stroke or mark of the pen in painting and drawing; a beloved font for anything with any kind of textual element — bonus marks if it’s handwritten rather than digital; a beloved plant that recurs within multiple garden schemes; a beloved posture or move in dance; a beloved ingredient in your baking repertoire. (Intentional and impish use of ‘beloved’ throughout — no AI intervention here.)
So, thinking about your own practice, what’s your equivalent of the em dash, and what are the uses you most often put it to?