The Em Dash

Summary

99% Invisible – "The Em Dash"

Host: Roman Mars
Episode Date: February 3, 2026
Summary by Podcast Summarizer

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Overview

In "The Em Dash," 99% Invisible explores the fascinating story of a once-overlooked punctuation mark that has influenced written language for centuries: the em dash. Through interviews with writers, historians, and typographers, the episode traces the em dash’s origins, its rise (and occasional fall) in literary esteem, and its sudden entanglement in modern debates over artificial intelligence, authorship, and authenticity—culminating in new, creative responses to the “AI dash problem.”

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Major Themes & Purpose

• Design legacy: Even something as small as a punctuation mark carries deep design legacies and cultural meanings often unnoticed—until controversy or technology brings them to the foreground.
• Literary and social history: The em dash’s journey from ancient manuscripts, through the golden age of novels and poetry, to a misunderstood “AI tell” in digital writing.
• Human vs Machine: How the em dash became a battleground in the contest over what “feels” human or artificial in our writing, and how designers and writers are responding.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reddit Drama: The Human vs. AI Em Dash

[01:17–04:35]

• Brian Vance, Portland journalist and creator of Stumptown Savings, is accused on Reddit of using AI (ChatGPT) to write his newsletter—solely because it features “extra-long EM dashes.”
  • Quote: “A Reddit user accused me of using AI, pointing to my use of quote, quote, extra long EM dashes that are not possible to replicate on a normal keyboard, end quote. So anyone who uses an EM dash must be using AI, and that's just not the case.” (Brian Vance, [03:07])
• The em dash—a longstanding punctuation choice for dramatic effect or clarity—suddenly becomes an unlikely signal for machine authorship.

2. The Em Dash: Origins & Evolution

[05:03–10:01]

• Keith Houston, author of Shady: The Secret Life of Punctuation, recounts the em dash’s murky beginnings in medieval Italy:
  • 13th-century scholar Boncompagno da Signa ("Bonnie") devises early marks: one evolves into the comma; another, a “horizontal dash,” resembles our modern em dash—but is slow to catch on.
  • Quote: “For whatever reason, he chose this very simple system... That looks exactly like a modern N or M dash.” (Keith Houston, [07:10])
• Literary experimentation in 16th–17th century theater (Shakespeare et al.) gives the dash new expressive roles: pauses, broken speech, dramatic interjections.

3. The Dash as Signature – Fiction, Realism & Rebellion

[10:01–16:01]

• The rise of the novel transforms the dash into a device for capturing the rhythms of natural speech and thought.
  • Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne, 1759) is held up as a classic “dash-mad” narrative, using the mark to emulate “stream of consciousness.”
  • Jane Austen strategically censors sensitive details with dashes (“adding the spice of factualness to an otherwise fictional story” [13:04–13:21]).
  • Quote: “So you might see someone's name, you might see the first letter of their name, followed by a few dashes.” (Keith Houston, [13:21])

4. Dash Masters: Poets & Punctuation Wars

[16:01–23:39]

• Emily Dickinson uses em dashes as a tool of ambiguity, quickness, and “unfinishedness”—leaving poems perpetually open and unsettled.
  • Quote: “She exploited unfinishedness... always undecided and always in the process of making and kind of never finished. And in that story, the dash and that suspendedness... is part of the unfinishedness of the poem.” (Fiona Green, [18:00])
  • Academic debates ensue over the true intent and musicality of Dickinson’s use of the dash, especially after editors removed most dashes posthumously.
• Grammar purists (from Jonathan Swift in the 18th century to the Chicago Manual of Style today) have often regarded the em dash with suspicion, advocating restraint.
  • Quote: “If in doubt, edit them out.” (Chicago Manual of Style, paraphrased, [22:45])

5. Modern Backlash: From Literary Flair to “ChatGPT Hyphen”

[23:39–29:45]

• Modern editorial and reader suspicion toward the em dash peaks as AI-written text, notably from LLMs (Large Language Models), is identified by its enthusiastic use of the mark.
  • Social media derides the “ChatGPT hyphen”; younger generations see excessive dashes as symptomatic of formulaic machine writing.
  • Quote: “This mark that was so heavily relied upon by the likes of Charlotte Bronte and Emily Dickinson is now being referred to as the ChatGPT hyphen.” (Will Aspinall, [25:32])
• Investigations show that LLMs began over-using the em dash after models were retrained extensively on massive datasets of 19th-century literary texts (which feature dash-heavy prose), thanks in part to “destructive scanning” of physical books (Anthropic lawsuit revelations, [28:12]).

6. Tech Industry Response & Ongoing Debate

[29:45–31:56]

• Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) semi-jokingly claims extra dashes are “for LOLs” and user demand, but admits overuse is an unintended side effect ([26:07–26:30]).
• Sean Gedeke (AI industry insider) suggests the sudden spike is due to LLMs’ ravenous ingestion of classic print literature—where em dashes are everywhere ([26:41–28:25]).
• The episode warns against seeing any punctuation habit as a “smoking gun” for AI writing.
  • Quote: “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, at least for now.” (Will Aspinall, [29:30])

7. What We Lose With AI-Authored Texts

[30:25–31:40]

• Dr. Fiona Green (Dickinson scholar) argues the “hard parts” of writing—the moments of struggle, discovery, and self-transformation—are essential and should not be outsourced.
  • Quote: “Everything that you read can matter. Every rabbit hole that you accidentally go down matters... It's the process of learning that then sends you out as a different human.” (Fiona Green, [30:52])

8. A Creative Counterattack: The "Amdash" Typeface

[37:26–42:12]

• Post-story coda: Sydney agency Coco Gun responds to AI-induced dash paranoia with a design intervention: the Amdash, a visually distinctive dash with curved “serifs,” meant to signal proudly human authorship.
  • Download fonts “Times New Human” and “Ariel” to use it; typing “am-” inserts the mark.
  • Quote: “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.” (Will Aspinall, [38:19])
• Ant Melder (Coco Gun co-founder): “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... a machine...” ([39:15])
• The Amdash is not just an in-joke but a bid to reclaim the playfulness and signature of human design.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Brian Vance: “It's an odd thing to be a fan of an EM dash, but I am a fan of it... There's a group of people who understand it and appreciate it and really value its flexibility.” ([03:52])
• Keith Houston: “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...” ([15:32])
• Fiona Green: “She exploited unfinishedness... The poems are always in the process, always undecided and always in the process of making and kind of never finished.” ([18:00])
• Roman Mars: “...the dash has now passed from the hand of Shakespeare into the vast data centers of this new age.” ([29:21])
• Sam Altman: “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 and it's kind of. It's quite annoying to me. We should fix that.” ([26:07])
• Ant Melder: “...the more it's used, every time someone uses it, that's kind of an example of, you know, that's another flag in the sand...” ([40:41])
• Fiona Green: Final reading, Dickinson's poem:

  “I felt a cleaving in my mind
  as if my brain had 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
  raveled out of sound like balls upon the floor.
  Isn't that wild?” ([32:33])

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:17–04:35] – Reddit accusation, AI paranoia, and the em dash
• [05:03–10:01] – Early history, medieval & Renaissance punctuation
• [10:01–16:01] – The dash in the novel, Tristram Shandy, Jane Austen
• [16:01–23:39] – Emily Dickinson, ambiguity, editorial battles
• [23:39–29:45] – AI era: overuse, suspicion, literary backlash
• [29:45–31:56] – Why LLMs picked up the dash; reflection on authorship
• [37:26–42:12] – The Amdash: design hack, fonts, human creativity in response to machine writing
• [32:33] – Poignant Dickinson reading (episode close)

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Conclusion

This episode reclaims the em dash from its reductive role as an “AI giveaway,” revealing its rich, chaotic literary and design heritage—as a mark expressive, ambiguous, and defiantly human. From medieval manuscripts to AI-generated prose, the em dash’s journey mirrors our relationship with writing, technology, and the never-ending improvisation of meaning. The playful invention of the Amdash shows that in the battle for our linguistic soul, even a mustachioed dash can become a flag of creative resistance.

For those who haven’t listened, “The Em Dash” is a witty, deeply researched, and unexpectedly emotional exploration of how a humble piece of punctuation holds a mirror to how we write, think, and remain human in a world increasingly written by machines.

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Episode reported by Will Aspinall and the 99PI team. For more: 99percentinvisible.org.

Transcript

[Roman Mars]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus auto customers qualify for an average of 7 discounts. Quote [e-mail] to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $744 by new customer survey who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations when you introduce extraordinary design into your life, something powerful happens. The world suddenly feels more alive, more vibrant, and you notice beauty where you didn't before. The same happens when you step into a Buick, feel the confidence of premium materials, revel in unexpected design details, and enjoy thoughtful technologies. Visit Buick.com to discover a luxury that can be yours right now. Buick Exceptional by Design, this is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Last summer, despite his better judgment, Brian Vance found himself in a situation that unfortunately, many of us have been in an argument with some random person on.

[Brian Vance]

Reddit, which is probably not the best thing to do. You know, getting into, 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]

Brian 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]

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

[Brian Vance]

Pantry through August 19, 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 like a Pulitzer Prize in literature for this.

[Will Aspinall]

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

[Brian Vance]

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

[Roman Mars]

As you can tell, Brian 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]

Brian 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.

[Brian Vance]

A Reddit user accused me of using AI, pointing to my use of quote, quote, extra long EM dashes that are not possible to replicate on a normal keyboard, end quote. 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 Brian 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.

[Roman Mars]

Capital M, 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.

[Brian 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, 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 die hard 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 M's in their responses like digital confetti.

[Brian Vance]

There are some people who look at it and be like, well, an AI must have did this because why would a human use an EM dash? But you know, that's I'm a human, I can confirm I'm human.

[Will Aspinall]

Today we're reclaiming the EM dash for Brian 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 to a very old problem.

[Keith Houston]

The problem that existed was that there wasn't really a good set of rules for punctuating texts. There wasn't really 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 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 11th and 12th 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, but.

[Roman Mars]

We'Re mercifully going to call him Bonnie. He practiced something called ars dictuminis, which was the formal art of composing letters.

[Will Aspinall]

And 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 vergula 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 vergola means, means comma, and in French it's vergule.

[Roman Mars]

He also created a second mark called virgula plana, which was a horizontal dash that ended the sentence like a period.

[Keith Houston]

And that is like a flat dash or a horizontal dash that looks exactly like a modern N or M 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, and to a certain extent, they were all not fixed, but in slightly more common use. Whereas the dash seemed to have. Yeah, it 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. 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 yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth. There's a technique in theatre called aposiopesis, which is an ancient Greek term for speech that is deliberately broken off mid sentence. Used sparingly, it can add dramatic effect.

[Roman Mars]

To dialogue, 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 volio 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, you know, full stops and commas and colons and so on.

[Will Aspinall]

Are they informed of this? My breath and blood fiery. The fiery duke till the hot duke let. No, but not yet. Maybe he is not well. 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 aposteopa 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 I guess 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 how someone, 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 Sterne in 1759.

[Ant Melder]

With us, you see, the case is quite different.

[Will Aspinall]

We are all ups and downs in this matter. You are a great genius, or TIS.

[Ant Melder]

50 to 1, sir, that you are.

[Will Aspinall]

A great dunce and a blockhead. Not that there is a total want of intermediate steps, no, when not so irregular as that comes to. But the two extremes are more common and in a greater degree in this unsettled island. This short excerpt has seven dashes in it, and it's used in every which way. In its wayward dash drew 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]

You know, someone like Sterne, when he's writing Tristram Shandy, he's jumping in and out of thoughts. He is. He's trying to commit this almost stream of consciousness narrative to paper. And it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Just I don't know what it is. There's something about the kind of the verve, the kind of the 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 novelist 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 readers a little bit.

[Will Aspinall]

In a world dominated by nonfiction, 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 real 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, Austin 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, I guess, 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. And 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 90.

[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 want to 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 prevails, 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've done a lot of work on Dickinson and she's one of my favourite poets. How are we doing?

[Roman Mars]

Perfect.

[Will Aspinall]

Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 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 midline. They just come like a parenthetical dash with one word in between two lines.

[Will Aspinall]

It's a void where we can pour.

[Fiona Green]

In our ideas 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. Right. And that the poems are always in the process, always undecided and always in the 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 inquiry 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.

[Roman Mars]

Can we read it?

[Fiona Green]

So 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 noticed when you read it, you kind of. You did run over a few dashes.

[Fiona Green]

Well, but listen, how would you read it? Read it with the dashes. 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 a way of moving quickly. And what is actually overriding any kind of punctuation is the metre. 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 of punctuation, particularly when it's this very familiar ballad form.

[Will Aspinall]

So the dash is to be seen and read.

[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 Lewis 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. Yes. 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's unusual, and it doesn't feel like 19th century thinking.

[Will Aspinall]

In lots of ways, 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 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 is set off with numerous breaks and dashes.

[Will Aspinall]

Almost a century later, an anonymous reviewer for the British Critic said this about a poem by Lord Byron. 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 Cressy Cornice spent two years studying the dashes in Jane Austen's 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, it's a really useful mark.

[Keith Houston]

I have to do it myself. I mean, I'm no Jane Austen, but I do have to self edit to stop myself 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 overusage 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 I think use the dash so as to sound lyrical and ought to be more decisive about what they're saying. So it 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? 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 Brian Vance from Stumptown. Savings from using it in spades.

[Brian Vance]

You know, let me read one of those entries again. So safe catch elite wild can tuna comma select varieties M dash 2 for 6. And I'm doing that deliberately because I'm trying to really call out the pricing separately from the item to, like, make that stand out.

[Roman Mars]

Clearly, Brian 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.

[Brian Vance]

A lot of what I had been seeing over the past six 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 you know, the hundredth time this week, and they instantly assume.

[Will Aspinall]

ChatGPT wrote that people around the Internet started to notice that many large language models like ChatGPT have the tendency to deploy the EN 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.

[Fiona Green]

ChatGPT hyphen is getting a lot of stick at the moment. Okay, pretty little thing recently had a rebrand. The top most liked comment was someone being like, I can't believe they let chat. 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 Bronte 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 Vaughn asked Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, about this on his podcast, Altman claimed he added the dashes for LOLs.

[Roman Mars]

Why does ChatGPT have that hyphen thing? 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 and it's kind of. 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 Gedeke believe it's much more complicated than that.

[Sean Gedeke]

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, that is 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 Gedeke]

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 Gedeke]

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 EM dashes, the AI would insert them back in.

[Will Aspinall]

Sean wondered what was going on in that timeframe 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 Gedeke]

These Companies began to search for more data, and in particular, they searched for print books, 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 Gedeke]

Again, this is pure speculation on my part. They kind of picked up the stylistic habits of these classic literature texts rather, 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.

[Roman Mars]

Writing, at least for now. There are still subtle hints that a piece of writing has been composed using AI. A formal tone, specific vocabulary words, a certain kind of beigeness 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, are precisely what it's all about.

[Fiona Green]

The thought that you can save time, 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 on. All of that is part of the study. You see these lights go on all the time, right? You went like this earlier. You know, Mind blow. 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 M Dash haters and lovers around the world. Small but happy Win. If you tell ChatGPT 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. What's your favourite poem?

[Fiona Green]

I do have a favourite. It starts I felt a cleaving in my mind. Know that one?

[Will Aspinall]

I don't. I asked Fiona if she'd send us out with her favorite poem by Emily M. 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 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 raveled out of sound like balls upon the floor. Isn't that wild?

[Roman Mars]

Coming up, Will tells me about one weapon in the battle against AI typography. Stay with us. New Year New look for your home with Article. It's easier than ever to transform your home with stylish and long lasting pieces that fit your budget and your style. They offer a curated selection of mid century, modern, coastal and scandi inspired pieces that would make a perfect addition to your home. And with Article's 30 day satisfaction guarantee, you can shop with confidence. So I've had a couple of dining chairs at my kitchen table that I bought at a fancy brick and mortar design store and I've had them just about four years and the seat support has already collapsed and they're falling apart and I'm finally going to replace them with Wasla Accorded dining chairs from Article. All my article pieces, of which there are many, many in my home, have never broken down, they've never gotten worn out from use and I'm so excited to get rid of these other chairs have been the bane of my existence. So in 2026 I'm getting rid of all the furniture that frustrates me in my house and replacing it with Article. Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people so when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. That's why LinkedIn has the highest B2B ROAS of all online ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com invisible terms and conditions apply. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace is the all in one website platform designed to help stand out and succeed online. Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid all in one place, from consultations to events and experiences. Showcase your offerings with a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business. Get paid on time with professional on brand invoices and online payments. Plus streamline your workflow with built in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools. I set up Romanmars.com on Squarespace I don't know, 12, 13 years ago and here's the best testimony that I can give. I never worry about it. I designed it myself. It just works. It updates on its own. It is never down as far as I know. It is just great. Head to squarespace.com invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. In 2005 I hired an intern straight out of college and her name was Delaney hall and I still work with her to this day. I think hiring is the most important thing that I do. Hiring isn't just about finding someone willing to take the job. You need the right person with the right background who can move your business forward. Give your job listing the best chance to be seen with Indeed's sponsored jobs. They help you stand out and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you need. Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes less Stress. Less time, more results. Now with Indeed sponsored jobs, and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com invisible just go to Indeed.com invisible right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com Invisible terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Do it the right way with Indeed. 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 and there's been kind of the stigma associated with using the EM dash, How it's this sort of like this 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. 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 M usage and taking steps to exterminate them, or you know, perhaps like me, thumb your nose at the grammar police and actually up EM dash use exponentially. A creative agency based in Sydney, Australia, called Coco Gun has opted for another approach, a redesign of the EM dash called the EM Dash.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, so what is the EM dash exactly?

[Will Aspinall]

So the EM 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 flare. 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, you know, at the left end it kind of curves down, and 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 it's very scarcity. Is that what makes it AI proof? Because language models go on probability. The likelihood of ChatGPT using an AmDash instead of an M 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 algorithm and all that kind of thing. But just to make a pointed comment on where we are in culture with.

[Will Aspinall]

This thing, that's Ant Melder, the co founder of Coco Gun in Sydney. He said that the Amdash 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, to a machine, to an algorithm.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, so if I'm understanding this correctly, using an EM dash instead of an EM dash, it's 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 amdash.

[Will Aspinall]

That's right.

[Keith Houston]

That's right.

[Roman Mars]

So how does one even use an Amdash? Like, I didn't know. I didn't know such a thing existed. Like, 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 Coco Gun. They're called Times New Human, which is the serif option, and Ariel, which is the Sons.

[Roman Mars]

Okay. They're doing a whole thing here. Okay.

[Will Aspinall]

Yeah. There's a lot of puns in this. There's a lot of puns, which I love a good pun. And then to use it, you simply type am and hyphen and it'll insert that little mustachioed 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'd 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, you know, that's another flag in the sand, I guess.

[Will Aspinall]

So the real challenge for the Amdash is getting accepted by Unicode and being one of almost 160,000 characters in the. An ant said that seeing the amdash 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 headline in the New York Times that had used the amdash. That would be just. That'd be, you know, dream come true.

[Will Aspinall]

I'm helping out Ant because I showed it to Brian 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 amdash being used to highlight the low, low price of tuna. And that would be a really neat end to the ordeal Brian's been through.

[Roman Mars]

But, you know, 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, you know, 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? You know, currently the em dashes everywhere and a few little em dashes. I mean, you know, we might be very old men by the time that happens.

[Roman Mars]

I see, I see. So we can win these battles for 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 Amdash and its predecessor, the Amdash. This has been such a fun episode to make. I really appreciate it.

[Will Aspinall]

Thank you, Roman. If you want to start using it, go to theamdash.com where there are links to downloading times, New human and a reel. Nice.

[Roman Mars]

99% Invisible was reported this week by Will Aspinall and edited by Vivian Le, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, Music by Swan Rial. Fact checking by Graham Haysha, who did unfortunately need to hand count the number of em dashes in Emily Dickinson's Hudson's work for this story. I'm so sorry about that, Graham. Special thanks this week to Sam Byrne, who performed the readings of our literary characters, and to Grant Hutchinson for his illuminating page on the em-on his website oikafuge.com Kathy 2 is our executive producer. Kurt Kolstead is the digital director. Delaney hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Perube, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Lashma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina, Gleason Talent, 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 [e-mail]. For the record, this episode contained 68 EM dashes, which I believe earns us a three on the Dickinson EM dash scale. Bubba Wallace here from 2311 Racing. You know what's slower than a pace car waiting at the car wash? That's when I fire up Chumba Casino. It turns these slow minutes into fast fun. With new games every week, you'll never get bored. Next time you're stuck in the slow lane, speed up with Chumba play [e-mail] let's Chumbo. No purchase necessary.

[Keith Houston]

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[Roman Mars]

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[Will Aspinall]

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