[phendrenad2]

No offense to any em-dash lovers, but I think an overuse of em-dashes indicates that your writing is probably slop, just not AI slop, human slop. In a sense, there is a kind of slop that relies on em-dashes to glue things together - usually in a cliche way, learned from lazy journalists copy-pasting from their last article to add a bit of spice to their writing - and AI just copied it.

(On the other hand, maybe it's just low-paid writers in South Africa: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape... )

[llamavore]

I agree with this too, I have read a lot of academic stuff with - em dashes and it reads like the author doesn't know how to write and is just translating spoken word to text.

When you are talking, an aside can make a lot of sense because you are thinking and speaking in real time. When you write you have the luxury of time to reformulate your words more precisely. Em dashes are best kept for prose that mimics speech rather than constructing logical text.

It's no coincidence that em dashes are rare in legal texts because they are too imprecise. Where as semicolons are extremely common in legal texts.

The S in semicolon stands for S-Tier. Maybe the E in em dash stands for E-Tier?

lolz

[shoobiedoo]

Maybe. I fell in love with them after reading Death on the Installment Plan by Celine, where he crams every sentence with them (and sequences of periods that have a similar effect). I found out later that he purposefully did that as a jab at Proust's writing where he did the exact opposite-- sentences a page and a half long with only commas and parenthesis.