That cheeky little em dash. Friend or foe?

I spotted this post from The Copy Posse's Alex Cattoni recently, and it sparks an interesting internal debate about what constitutes credible writing.

Alex Cattoni's post which sparked my internal discussion.

So what are the origins of an em dash?

This is the beast — a sneakily long dash to indicate a pause.

The name originates from the mark being the same width as the capital letter M. I see what they did there, Ground-breaking stuff.

It seems we have the ancient Greeks to thank for this punctuation based kerfuffle. The punctuation mark was used millennia ago and now seems to have popped itself back into the written world for some reason, even though it was dropped in the era of the typewriter.

So, how come I had not heard of such a thing until about a year ago? How come it wasn't even briefly mentioned during my years at school or university? The argument seems to me that, if it is not something anyone is being routinely taught, and not something anyone really understands and therefore believes can only be generated by AI, then can we maybe just consign it to a museum and agree to forget about it before it causes any more confusion?

It has crossed my mind that it doesn't even exist on a standard keyboard, which is perhaps why it seems suspicious when it does get used. So, how are you meant to type it then? The knack is a super easy Alt + 0151 (on the numeric keyboard) 🙄but what a total faff! If it was such an important thing in writing then it should at least be commonplace on the standard keyboard!

There is perhaps another reason why it doesn't seem to have entered the world of paper and pen, because you wouldn't be able to easily distinguish between a hyphen and an em dash in that context as everyone's would be different in length, where on a computer keyboard, the length is standardised.

Does any of this matter?

Technically yes, if credible and successful copywriters are accused of sounding like AI, then the argument could be

1. They are brilliant writers, so consequently they sound like a brilliant AI machine writer that has done infinite amounts of learning at speed

2. AI is learning so well and so insanely rapidly that if we try to achieve perfection in our copy, we will only sound like we have cheated. Groan.

I personally think the idiosyncrasies and magic of the human brain cannot be outperformed or replicated just yet, in my opinion. It is almost too schooled and perfect to allow it to be believed as human, and rightly so, because it isn't!

It is unhelpful if wildly successful copywriters such as Alex Cattoni are being accused of using AI just because she uses the em dash for effect. If you can't be so good at what you do that you potentially sound like AI, and all the while AI is forging its way closer to human-like output, then what is actually right and what is actually wrong?

I'll stick to being human, thanks.

Feel free to join in on this debate. What's your take on this little hipster that is creeping its way back into the modern world of copy?