The Em Dash

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 

Last summer, despite his better judgment, Bryan Vance found himself in a situation that, unfortunately, many of us have been in: an argument with some random person on Reddit. 

BRYAN VANCE: Which is probably not the best thing to do. You know, getting into online fights is not a good use of anyone’s time, and it’s definitely not good for your blood pressure. 

WILL ASPINALL: Bryan is a journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who founded something called Stumptown Savings. 

ROMAN MARS: That is frequent 99 PI contributor Will Aspinall. 

WILL ASPINALL: Stumpton Savings is a website that covers local grocery deals. Every Thursday, Bryan releases a newsletter where he helps his readers find the best food prices in the area. He read me a little snippet. 

BRYAN VANCE: “Pantry through August 19th. Equal exchange, chocolate bar, select varieties, $3.99 each. Annie’s organic salad dressing, select varieties, two for eight.” You can see this is pretty dry. Like, there’s not a lot that I can do to make it intriguing to read. “Once again, organic peanut butter, select varieties, $5.99, each.” Yeah, I mean, I’m not under the guise that I’m going to win a Pulitzer Prize in literature for this. 

WILL ASPINALL: It mightn’t be Faulkner, but Bryan takes a lot of pride in his work, including visiting grocery stores in person to find the hottest deals for his readers. 

BRYAN VANCE: Stumptown Savings has become my full-time job. I spend 40 hours a week doing this, just trying to help people have some say—have some power—in what feels like a powerless struggle with corporate greed and inflation. 

ROMAN MARS: As you can tell, Bryan puts a lot of effort into Stumptown Savings, so he was particularly miffed when a user on Reddit accused him of the ultimate sin: using ChatGPT to compose his newsletter. 

WILL ASPINALL: Bryan didn’t use AI. But it wasn’t just the accusation itself that he found offensive. It was the evidence the Reddit user provided to support his allegation. 

BRYAN VANCE: A Reddit user accused me of using AI, pointing to my use of “extra long em dashes that are not possible to replicate on a normal keyboard.” So anyone who uses an em dash must be using AI, and that’s just not the case. 

ROMAN MARS: The reason why this Redditor believed Bryan was using AI was because he chose to use an em dash. 

WILL ASPINALL: The em dash—if you’re not familiar—is a form of punctuation that looks like a horizontal bar in a sentence. It gets its name from its size, which is about the width of a capital M. 

ROMAN MARS: Not to be confused with the hyphen or its persnickety cousin, the en dash, em dashes are incredibly versatile because they can replace commas, colons, semicolons, and parentheses. 

BRYAN VANCE: It’s an odd thing to be a fan of an em dash, but I am a fan of it. It’s a fun piece of punctuation. There’s a group of people who understand it and appreciate it and really value its flexibility. 

ROMAN MARS: Today, there are many diehard fans of the em dash. But humans aren’t the only ones who have taken to using the mark. Recently, large language models, like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, have been sprinkling ems in their responses, like digital confetti. 

BRYAN VANCE: There are some people who will look at it and be like, “Well, an AI must’ve did this because why would a human use an em dash?” But… That’s… I’m a human. I can confirm I’m human. 

WILL ASPINALL: Today we’re reclaiming the em dash for Bryan and other humans because this plucky bit of punctuation has had a very, very long literary history, way beyond today’s tussles with technology. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s been on a hero’s journey, playing the lead in an adventure story that has spanned both centuries and the pages of our most beloved plays, novels, and poems. So, who invented it? And why? 

WILL ASPINALL: The em dash’s origins can be found in trying to find an elegant answer to a very old problem. 

KEITH HOUSTON: The problem that existed was that there wasn’t really a good set of rules for punctuating text. There wasn’t any kind of convention that persisted for all that long or that was usable across lots of different contexts. 

WILL ASPINALL: This is Keith Houston, author of the book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. He says that, while punctuation crept into writing systems around the third century BCE, the rules that governed them remained both complex and inconsistent well into the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was around that time an Italian scholar decided to leave his mark on the world of punctuation. His name was Boncompagno Da Signa.

ROMAN MARS: But we’re mercifully going to call him “Bonnie.” He practiced something called Ars Dictaminis, which was the formal art of composing letters and official documents. 

WILL ASPINALL: The problem was that he found the then-system of punctuation not up to snuff for his letter writing. So he came up with his own. 

KEITH HOUSTON: And so when you had someone like Bonnie deciding to write a guide to letter writing, it was kind of up to him to decide how to punctuate things. And for whatever reason, he chose this very simple system.

ROMAN MARS: Bonnie created two punctuation marks. One he called “virgula sursum erecta,” which looked like a forward slash. That one indicated a pause in a sentence. 

WILL ASPINALL: The forward slash was eventually shortened and dropped to the bottom of the line, transforming it into the comma we all recognize today. It remains his greatest contribution to punctuation. And if you’re fluent in Italian, which I am not, you will know that “virgula” means “comma.” And in French, it’s “virgule.” 

ROMAN MARS: He also created a second mark, called “virgula plana,” which was a horizontal dash that ended a sentence, like a period. 

KEITH HOUSTON: And that is, like, a flat dash or a horizontal dash that looks exactly like a modern en or em dash.

ROMAN MARS: But using a dash at the end of a sentence did not catch on. And for several centuries, it was difficult to find consistent uses of the dash. 

WILL ASPINALL: Possibly because the dash was not widely adopted, its grammatical role remained slightly unclear and therefore malleable. 

KEITH HOUSTON: I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable to look at the marks around it. So the full stop or period, the question mark, the comma, the colon, the semicolon—to a certain extent they were all not fixed but in slightly more common use. Whereas the dash seemed to have, yeah, slid into this new era of printing without necessarily a big weight of opinion behind it. So perhaps it seemed more flexible. 

WILL ASPINALL: There was freedom to experiment in its use, which is exactly what happened when it got mixed up in the theatrical milieu of 16th and 17th century Elizabethan England. 

JOHN GIELGUD: “No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall—I will do such things,— 

What they are, What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be

The terrors of the earth…”

WILL ASPINALL: There’s a technique in theater called “aposiopesis,” which is an ancient Greek term for speech that is deliberately broken off mid-sentence. Used sparingly, it can add dramatic effect to dialogue. 

ROMAN MARS: Sort of like— This. 

WILL ASPINALL: Playwrights use the dash in writing to indicate thinking pauses, interruptions, mid-speech realizations, or changes of subject for their actors. One rather famous playwright was quite fond of it. 

KEITH HOUSTON: Shakespeare’s first folio is a really good example where people are cut off when they lose their train of thought. It uses quite a lot of dashes, I think, because it gives a bit of flexibility—it gets a bit more expressiveness—than full stops and commas and colons and so on. 

JOHN GIELGUD: “Are they inform’d of this? My breath and blood!

Fiery? the fiery duke? Tell the hot duke that—

No, but not yet: may be he is not well…”

WILL ASPINALL: King Lear—as performed by Sir John Gielgud in 1994—a character facing the demons of old age, bad decisions, and ungrateful children. In other words, someone who might get lost in his thoughts more than most. 

ROMAN MARS: Using dashes to show aposiopesis has remained a staple of stage writing. But around 100 years after Shakespeare, in the early 18th century, an emerging branch of the literary arts elevated it from mere stage direction to a featured performer. 

KEITH HOUSTON: Yeah, so, if playwrights had used the dash to imply how a speaker was performing these words, I suppose, for novelists, it was also used to indicate the cadence of how someone was speaking, to try and bring that to life a little bit. 

ROMAN MARS: The novel as a literary form was—well—novel. It was a brand new form of writing with stylistic conventions that broke away from classical rules of literature. Writers at the time explored authentic fictional characters with complex inner thoughts and naturalistic ways of speaking. 

WILL ASPINALL: And the em dash was how early novelists attempted to capture that. The dash became a really handy device to create the sense of someone almost dictating their adventures onto the page. Nowhere is this more obvious than a rambling satirical novel called Tristram Shandy, written by Lawrence Stern in 1759. 

SAM BERN: “With us, you see, the case is quite different:—we are all ups and downs in this matter;—you are a great genius;—or ’tis fifty to one, Sir, you are a great dunce and a blockhead;—not that there is a total want of intermediate steps,—no,—we are not so irregular as that comes to;—but the two extremes are more common, and in a greater degree in this unsettled island…”

WILL ASPINALL: This short excerpt has seven dashes in it, and it’s used in every which way. In its wayward, dash-strewn madness, it feels like Tristram Shandy is a fully rounded and totally flawed human being. There had been nothing like it before in English literature. 

KEITH HOUSTON: Someone like Stern, when he’s writing Tristram Shandy, he’s jumping in and out of thoughts. He’s trying to commit this almost stream of consciousness narrative to paper. And it feels like it could have been written yesterday. I don’t know what it is. There’s something about the verve—the kind of gusto behind it. It must have been like a bolt from the blue. It must have been so incredible for people at the time to read this. 

ROMAN MARS: But novelists didn’t stop there. Another way they used the dash to convey the illusion of reality was by using the dash to censor sensitive content. 

KEITH HOUSTON: It wasn’t just for sort of the sake of prurience. It was also to give a sense of authenticity, I think, to sort of titillate the readers a little bit. 

WILL ASPINALL: In a world dominated by non-fiction, these early writers were using every trick in the book to be taken seriously and make their make-believe stories feel believable. One of the ways they did this was by writing as if the fictional narrative actually took place. Novels were commonly written in the first person as if they were letters, diary entries, or memoirs to create a sense that it was a real account. 

ROMAN MARS: Oftentimes names, locations, and dates were censored by dashes, sometimes to protect the identity of a real person, but more often to act as if they were protecting the identity of a person, adding the spice of factualness to an otherwise fictional story. 

KEITH HOUSTON: So you might see someone’s name. You might see the first letter of their name followed by a few dashes. 

WILL ASPINALL: One writer who used the dash in this way was Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, the arrival of the handsome Wickham causes a stir in the fictional town of Meryton. But Wickham is not all that he seems. And when his character is introduced, Austen uses dashes to redact the letters in the name of the army regiment he is about to join, as if that information was scrubbed from the record. 

KEITH HOUSTON: Yes! She doesn’t want to impugn the reputation of his military regiment, I think, is what she’s trying to get across. Again, it’s in the service of dramatic realism or the perception of realism here. “I couldn’t possibly say that thing. These are honorable men, apart from Wickham who isn’t.”

WILL ASPINALL: The added delight for consumers of these novels was working out the hidden meaning behind the saucy little dash—a tantalizing mystery that promised to be revealed with a careful read. So as well as adding realism to a story, the dash as a censoring device was a clever piece of marketing, helping sell these shiny new works of fiction to an increasingly literate population. And em dash use only exploded from there. 

ROMAN MARS: According to one 2018 academic study, dash usage in the English language rose sharply in the 19th century. If there was a golden age for the dash, this was it. 

WILL ASPINALL: Charles Dickens was relatively stingy. Oliver Twist has 703 dashes or one dash every 224 words. Herman Melville was undoubtedly a fan. Moby Dick clocks in with one dash every 129 words. And Jane Eyre—Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece—one dash every ninety.

ROMAN MARS: A lot of this widespread adoption caught on because of how versatile the em dash can be. At its very core, the em dash signifies a visual pause on the page. And so in that way, it could easily stand in for other grammatical pauses, like the comma or colon or semicolon, except, you know, a little more fun. 

KEITH HOUSTON: It’s such a useful thing. It allows you to do a kind of a U-turn within a sentence. I’ve heard it described as being useful for special effects, when you want to introduce a real change in tone or sentiment or direction, or when you set up a punchline, for example. 

WILL ASPINALL: But importantly, the em dash was a punctuation mark that can make a sentence feel more human. In real life, we are naturally changing thoughts, cutting off others or cutting off ourselves. 

ROMAN MARS: And one American poet would come to be defined by this punctuation mark more than any other, using them not for the way we talk, but to fathom the workings of the human mind. 

FIONA GREEN: “Much Madness is divinest Sense —

To a discerning Eye —

Much Sense — the starkest Madness —

’Tis the Majority

In this, as all, prevail —

Assent — and you are sane —

Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —

And handled with a Chain —”

WILL ASPINALL: That is the dash-laden poetry of Emily Dickinson, as read by my former English professor at Cambridge. 

FIONA GREEN: So my name’s Fiona Green. I’m a fellow at Jesus College and a lecturer at the English Faculty. And I’ve been here for about 30 years if you can believe it. And I have done a lot of work on Dickinson. And she’s one of my favorite poets. How are we doing? 

WILL ASPINALL: Perfect. 

WILL ASPINALL: Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems in Amherst, Massachusetts, many of them composed during the Civil War. She put into verse the challenges of life, death, and everything in between, accompanied by thousands of dashes. 

FIONA GREEN: Some of them are very easy and straightforward and have obviously obvious reference, but some of them don’t make any sense. And some of them seem to represent a mind that’s absolutely at odds with itself. So sometimes they come mid-line—they just come like a parenthetical dash with one word in between two lines. 

WILL ASPINALL: It’s a void where we can pour in our ideas. 

FIONA GREEN: That makes it sound really sloppy. And I don’t think she’s a sloppy thinker. I think that she’s a quick, quick thinker. 

WILL ASPINALL: Dickinson used dashes to quickly move on to the next thought, caring less about completion than pinning down her unique insights of the human experience onto paper. 

FIONA GREEN: She exploited unfinishedness and that the poems are always in the process, always undecided, and always in process of making and kind of never finished. And in that story, the dash and that suspendedness—that suspendedness of decision over punctuation—is part of the unfinishedness of the poem. It’s not clear to me that she was writing something primarily, if at all, for publication. 

WILL ASPINALL: Dickinson never gave a reason for using dashes instead of other punctuation marks, leading to decades of academic enquiry and speculation. It feels as though she used the flexibility of the dash to introduce even more ambiguity to a poem’s meaning. 

FIONA GREEN: So there’s a very famous poem called Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man. 

WILL ASPINALL: Can we read it? 

FIONA GREEN: “Publication – is the Auction

Of the Mind of Man –

Poverty – be justifying

For so foul a thing

Possibly – but We – would rather

From Our Garret go

White – unto the White Creator –

Than invest – Our Snow –”

WILL ASPINALL: I mean, I noticed when you read it, you kind of did run over a few dashes. 

FIONA GREEN: But listen. How would you read it? Read it with the dash. Read the dashes out loud. How do they sound? 

WILL ASPINALL: “Publication – is the Auction

Of the Mind of Man –

Poverty – be justifying

For so foul a thing”

FIONA GREEN: So you’re assuming that a dash is a pause. And yet we’ve also said that a dash is the way of moving quickly. And what is actually overriding any kind of punctuation is the meter. We know how it goes. 

“Publication – is the Auction

Of the Mind of Man –

Poverty – be justifying

For so foul a thing”

So the metrical frame overrides any kind punctuation, particularly when it’s this very familiar ballad form. 

WILL ASPINALL: So the dash is to be seen in red?

FIONA GREEN: Yeah. You can’t hear the dashes. 

WILL ASPINALL: Mind blown, as so often 25 years ago. 

ROMAN MARS: When Emily Dickinson died in 1886 at the age of 55, her handwritten poems were edited and published by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. They gave the poems titles, capitalized words, and crucially, removed most of her dashes. 

WILL ASPINALL: Look, I know I am reducing her mind-altering verse to a set of statistics, but I’ve counted all the dashes left out in the first collection of poems Todd and Higginson published in 1890. Out of the 1,151 dashes, they kept just 52 of them. That’s a big, big change to how the poems look on the page, even if, as Fiona says, it didn’t change how they were read out. 

FIONA GREEN: I think they put her into circulation in a way that was legible to a 19th century audience. So it looks to us like a hatchet job, but it looks to that readership in the 1890s as something familiar—something they can read. It’s avant-garde, it’s strange, it is unusual, and it doesn’t feel like 19th-century thinking in lots of ways. 

WILL ASPINALL: Her first posthumous collection was a sensation, and her poems have never gone out of print. But it was not the first time in English literary history grammar purists felt that the dash count was too high for the times. 

ROMAN MARS: Ever since the em dash became a widely adopted punctuation mark, it has faced backlash. A century before Dickinson, Jonathan Swift mocked excessive use of the dash by contemporary writers in a long, satirical poem. 

“In modern Wit all printed Trash, isSet off with num’rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—”

WILL ASPINALL: Almost a century later, an anonymous reviewer for the British Critic said this about a poem by Lord Byron…

SAM BERN: “We must protest against the effect of dashes, which occur without any reason, whatsoever, sometimes twice or thrice in one line, and never less than a dozen times in a page.”

ROMAN MARS: And while Jane Austen’s dashes may have titillated her readers, with her editors, it was a different story. Recently, a writer and comedian named Kressie Kornis spent two years studying the dashes in Jane Austens’ published and unpublished works. And she estimates that over 6,000 em dashes were edited out from Pride and Prejudice. 

KEITH HOUSTON: It’s easy to overuse the dash. 

WILL ASPINALL: Keith Houston again. 

KEITH HOUSTON: It’s a really useful mark. I have to do it myself. I mean, I’m no Jane Austen. But I do have to self-edit to stop myself from using it all the time. 

ROMAN MARS: Even today, modern guardians of grammar, like the Chicago Manual of Style, warn writers like Keith against dash over usage with the catchy rhyme, “If in doubt, edit them out.” 

WILL ASPINALL: Even Fiona Green, my professor and Emily Dickinson maven believes that, as versatile as it is, other more targeted punctuation can be necessary for clarity.

FIONA GREEN: I was thinking of certain prose writers—I better not say who—who, I think, used the dash so as to sound lyrical and ought to be more decisive about what they’re saying. It’s kind of multipurpose, but it’s also a way of not making decisions. I would say, “Well, what exactly is the connection between this thought and that thought?” I need to know if it’s a semicolon or a comma because then there’s a different thought being expressed and a different articulation, which means a joining together of thoughts. 

WILL ASPINALL: As far as punctuation is concerned, the em dash could be a bit divisive. And for centuries, critics, editors, technical writers, and authors of various op-eds have opined over whether it’s a mark of lazy grammar. 

ROMAN MARS: But divisive or not, that never stopped great writers like Henry James, Jack Kerouac, or Bryan Vance from Stumptown Savings from using it in spades. 

BRYAN VANCE: You know, let me read one of those entries again. So, “Safe Catch Elite Wild canned tuna, select varieties—two for six.” And I’m doing that deliberately because I’m trying to really call out the pricing separate from the item to, like, make that stand out. 

ROMAN MARS: Clearly, Bryan is and always will be a fan of the em dash, which is why he was dismayed in 2025 when the em dash got dragged into the debate about whether it’s a clear signal that the text was written by AI. 

BRYAN VANCE: A lot of what I’ve been seeing over the past 6 months, really, is that, you know, the em dash is a dead giveaway that someone’s using ChatGPT. But some people see an em dash, probably for the 100th time this week, and they instantly assume ChatGPT wrote that. 

WILL ASPINALL: People around the internet started to notice that many large language models like ChatGPT have the tendency to deploy the em dash with reckless abandon. It was to the point that some—well—younger generations who might be more attuned to reading emails and text messages began referring to it as something else. 

LUXEGEN_OFFICIAL: ChatGPT hyphen is getting a lot of stick at the moment. Pretty Little Thing recently had a rebrand. The top most-liked comment was someone being like, “I can’t believe they let ChatGPT write it.” It’s a longer hyphen. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it. Advice that we’ve been given and—yeah—everyone should take it. Public service announcement. Take out the hyphen…

WILL ASPINALL: This mark that was so heavily relied upon by the likes of Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson is now being referred to as the “ChatGPT hyphen.” That is how much people are connecting it with artificial intelligence. 

ROMAN MARS: So how is it that a punctuation mark used for hundreds of years to make writing feel more human became a captcha for machine-generated text? 

WILL ASPINALL: When Theo Vonn asked Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, about this on his podcast, Altman claimed he added the dashes for lols. 

THEO VONN: Why does ChatGPT have that hyphen thing? 

SAM ALTMAN: You know, we have this team that figures out what the model’s personality should be like and how it should behave. And a lot of users like em dashes, so we added more em dashes. And now I think we have too many em dashes. But that’s the answer, is it was just, like, users liked it. We put more in. Now it’s, like, a little bit of a meme. It’s quite annoying to me. We should fix that…

WILL ASPINALL: It’s not entirely clear whether Altman’s telling us the whole story. And industry insiders like Sean Goedecke believe it’s much more complicated than that. 

SEAN GOEDECKE: It’s surprisingly hard to find the answer. There’s not the kind of consensus on the topic that you would expect for something so observable. Certainly all of the closed models, i.e. all of the best models, the process of training them is a trade secret. 

WILL ASPINALL: Sean says that this is a pretty recent phenomenon and that ChatGPT hasn’t always used a lot of em dashes in its writing. 

SEAN GOEDECKE: So GPT 3.5 came out in November 2022 and didn’t use a lot of em dashes.

ROMAN MARS: Around that time, OpenAI’s language model had mostly been trained on publicly available data around the web—things like websites, articles, blogs, pirated books, around 600,000 Enron emails. Probably not a ton of em dashes used in those Enron emails. 

SEAN GOEDECKE: And then—July 2024—by that time the models were producing a lot of em dashes. So there’s this kind of just under two-year window. 

ROMAN MARS: ChatGPT users all began to notice not just that em dashes were frequently used, but that the LLM wouldn’t stop using it. Numerous OpenAI and Reddit threads from frustrated users claimed that no matter how much they prompted to avoid M dashes, the AI would insert them back in. 

WILL ASPINALL: Sean wondered what was going on in that time frame that led to the emergence of the em dash. And in June 2025, he got the clue he needed. Anthropic, the company behind the LLM Claude and one of OpenAI’s main competitors, were forced to reveal their methods in a lawsuit. 

SEAN GOEDECKE: These companies began to search for more data. And in particular, they searched for print books from older decades that perhaps weren’t as represented in the previous training data. 

ROMAN MARS: Court documents have shown that Anthropic aimed to expand the language model not just by feeding it information that was publicly available on the web but quite literally all the books in the world. 

WILL ASPINALL: In a process called “destructive scanning,” Anthropic bought millions of books, cut the pages out of their bindings, and digitized them to feed Claude. Sean suspects the model’s ravenous appetite for words most likely included all of the great authors of our time, em dashes and all. 

SEAN GOEDECKE: Again, this is pure speculation. They kind of picked up the stylistic habits of these, like, classic literature texts, which seem very incongruous when people use them today to write emails and job applications and that kind of thing. So if you were to train language models on a bunch of late 1800s, early 1900s English, they might end up using em dashes as much as those books do, which today would seem like overuse. 

ROMAN MARS: And with that, the dash has now passed from the hand of Shakespeare into the vast data centers of this new age. 

WILL ASPINALL: It is, of course, reductive to assume any bit of writing that contains an em dash was written by AI. In fact, the reason why LLMs add em dashes to generated text is because it’s a mark that we have used for literally hundreds of years in published writing. 

ROMAN MARS: At least for now, there’s still subtle hints that a piece of writing has been composed using AI: a formal tone, specific vocabulary words, a certain kind of beige-ness to the writing itself… But there is something about that long, elegant dash on a page that makes it easy to pick out and pick on. It’s an easy mark. 

WILL ASPINALL: The em dash may have gotten unfairly caught up in the bigger existential dread around AI. It goes without saying, though, that there are bigger issues at stake than ruminating over a piece of punctuation. And not everyone has lost their focus or their minds. 

FIONA GREEN: Does punctuation really make people angry? I mean, there are so many things in the world to make you angry. 

WILL ASPINALL: As an educator, it’s not necessarily spotting the difference between real and fake that gets Dr. Fiona Green’s blood boiling. What concerns her is that people don’t seem to understand what they are surrendering when they allow AI to do the hard parts for them—that the hard parts are precisely what it’s all about. 

FIONA GREEN: The thought that you can save time and that the machine will do it more quickly… What are you trying to get to? Everything that you read can matter. Every rabbit hole that you accidentally go down matters. Misreading things and reading something boring and stopping halfway through and so on and so—all of that is part of the study. You see these lights go on all the time, right? You went like this earlier… “Mind blown.” It changes the way people think. It rewires their brain, okay? So why would we introduce a machine? Why would we outsource exactly that perfect moment to something else? It’s the process of learning that then sends you out as a different human. 

ROMAN MARS: In November of 2025, Sam Altman announced the news to em dash haters and lovers around the world. “Small but happy win. If you tell chat GPT not to use em dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do.”

WILL ASPINALL: Perhaps with this update, some AI users will abandon dashes entirely, which I cannot say I am too cut up about. After all these years and after countless adventures together, the em dash belongs back with us humans. 

WILL ASPINALL: What’s your favorite poem? 

FIONA GREEN: I do have a favorite. It starts, “I felt a cleaving in my mind…” You know that one? 

WILL ASPINALL: I don’t.

WILL ASPINALL: I asked Fiona if she’d send us out with her favorite poem by Emily “Em Dash” Dickinson. And in the unsure, maddening future we are heading towards, the choice felt appropriate. 

FIONA GREEN: “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—

As if my Brain had split—

I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—

But could not make them fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before—

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound—

Like Balls—upon a floor—” 

Isn’t that wild? 

ROMAN MARS: Coming up, Will tells me about one weapon in the battle against AI writing: typography. Stay with us. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So we’re back with Will Aspinall. And in the main story, you talked about how the em dash got caught up in the sort of existential dread that comes along with AI. There’s been kind of this stigma associated with using the em dash—how it’s this sort of smoking gun that, if you see an em dash, it means that this thing was written by AI. And it’s gotten to the point where people actively avoid using the punctuation because they’re trying to avoid the accusation of using AI for their writing. But you’re here because you want to talk about this really inventive, design-led solution that’s a more positive spin on this whole situation. 

WILL ASPINALL: Yeah, exactly. So, instead of obsessively monitoring your em dash usage and taking steps to exterminate them or, perhaps like me, thumb your nose at the grammar police and actually up em dash usage exponentially, a creative agency based in Sydney, Australia called Cocogun has opted for another approach: a redesign of the em dash called the “am dash.” 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so what is the am dash exactly? 

WILL ASPINALL: So the am dash is a new punctuation mark that you would use exactly like an em dash: for pauses, commas, as a colon, or just for some dramatic flair. But it looks a little different. So here’s a picture. Can you see that, Roman? 

ROMAN MARS: Yes. So this is like the em dash. It’s this long bar. But at the left end, it kind of curves down. And at the right end, it curves up. It’s kind of like an em dash with serifs on it, sort of like a tilde. 

WILL ASPINALL: Exactly. Yeah. And my initial reaction was it looks like one of those kind of suave, ’20s-style pencil mustaches. So the idea is that you put one or more of these babies in your writing instead of an em dash, and you’ll never be confused for a machine or be accused of using one because its very scarcity is what makes it AI-proof because language models go on probability. The likelihood of ChatGPT using an am dash instead of an em is infinitesimally small. 

ANT MELDER: Is there a way of making a statement? Is it a bit of a… I don’t mean a human fight back in a kind of like, “Yeah! Let’s man the fences and kind of tear down the river and all that kind of thing!” But it’s just to make a pointed comment on where we are in culture with this thing.

WILL ASPINALL: That’s Ant Melder, the co-founder of Cocogun in Sydney. He said that the am dash came about in trying to find the appropriate response to the rise of AI writing. 

ANT MELDER: We wanted it to be rooted in a real love of writing. It just kind of really sucks that people would outsource all writing to, you know, a machine—to an algorithm. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so if I’m understanding this correctly, using an am dash instead of an em dash is kind of this symbolic way to signal that the text that I am writing has been typed up by me, a human, because an LLM wouldn’t ever think to insert an am dash. 

WILL ASPINALL: That’s right. That’s right. 

ROMAN MARS: So how does one even use an am dash? Like, I didn’t know such a thing existed. How do you actually insert it into whatever word processor you’re using? 

WILL ASPINALL: Okay, so, yeah, to get it requires downloading two fonts developed by Cocogun. They’re called Time’s New Human, which is the Serif option, and Areal, which is the font. 

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHING] So they’re doing a whole thing here, okay. 

WILL ASPINALL: Yeah, there’s a lot of puns in this. There are a lot of pun, which I love. I love a good pun. And then to use it, you simply type “am” and a hyphen, and it’ll insert that little mustachio dash into your work. So to replace the em dash with the am takes a very human type commitment. And that is one of the reasons I really, really like this idea. It’s the sheer eccentric humanity of this project. It’s… Okay, it’s really, really low stakes, but the response has surprised Ant with thousands of downloads since its release in May 2025. 

ANT MELDER: We didn’t really think we’d get that many downloads. We thought there would be maybe a couple of hundred and that’d be it. And the more it’s used—every time someone uses it—that’s kind of an example of another flag in the sand, I guess. 

WILL ASPINALL: So the real challenge for the am dash is getting accepted by Unicode and being one of almost 160,000 characters in the current book. And Ant said that seeing the am dash appear in the wild would really be a crowning achievement. 

ANT MELDER: If there was an article in the New York Times—like a headline in the New York Times—that used the am dash, that would be just a dream come true. 

WILL ASPINALL: I’m helping out Ant because I showed it to Bryan Vance of Stumptown Savings fame, and he was very taken with it. So, you know, who knows? If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area, you might get to see the am dash being used to highlight the low, low price of tuna. And that would be a really neat end to the ordeal Bryan’s been through.

ROMAN MARS: But this brings to mind an issue, which is as it gets used out in the wild, then it does get picked up by LLMs. And then it would be regurgitated by some kind of AI composer. 

WILL ASPINALL: I mean, I would say there’s a huge imbalance. This is a David and Goliath story, right? And currently the em dash is everywhere. And a few little am dashes—we might be very old men by the time that happens.

ROMAN MARS: I see. So we can win these battles right now and worry about the overall war later. 

WILL ASPINALL: That’s it. The moment is now. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, this is great. Thank you so much for this story about the am dash and its predecessor, the em dash. This has been such a fun episode to make. I really appreciate it. 

WILL ASPINALL: Thank you, Roman. And if you want to start using it, go to theamdash.com, where there are links to downloading Times New Human and Areal. 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall, and edited by Vivian Le. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia, who did unfortunately need to hand count the number of em dashes in Emily Dickinson’s work for this story. Sorry about that, Graham.

Special thanks this week to: Sam Bern who performed the readings of our literary characters, and to Grant Hutchison and his illuminating page on the em dash on his website oikofuge.com.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. 

You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.

For the record, this episode contained 68 em dashes, which I believe earns us a three on the Dickinson em dash scale.