Defund the em dash police
We need to defund the em dash police. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, congratulations on leading a charmed — mostly offline, AI-free — life. Also, what rock do you live under, and is there room for me?
The em dash police are people who’ve deputized themselves to spot AI copy. Basically, they’re text-based vigilantes. Like all vigilantes, they’re prone to fuck-ups. When they see an em dash, they pounce. They aren’t empowered to arrest, but to annoy. Here’s the em dash police training manual.
Name and social media handle redacted to protect the stupidI’ve had a few run-ins with the em dash police this year. Usually, they bust into the comments section where I work, but they’ve also been known to target Situation Normal. Their schtick is always the same. They accuse me of using AI to write or edit my copy. Their proof? A punctuation mark they don’t recognize or understand — the em dash.
A word about the em dash. I’m not grammarian — a word I had to Google — so please understand that I’m not an expert. The mighty em dash can be deployed in place of commas, parentheses, semicolons, and colons. It’s the utility player of punctuation marks. Like baseball’s greatest utility players — Cookie Rojas, José Oquendo, Brock Holt, and my personal favorite, Mickey Hatcher — the em dash can play any position, including pitcher, pinch hit or pinch run, and even strap on catcher’s gear if your primary catcher is ejected and your back-up catcher is out with an injury. If forced to write a book with only one type of punctuation mark, I’d pick the em dash over the period eight days a week and twice on Sunday. Here’s how a writer in the New York Times described the em dash:
The longest of the dashes — roughly the length of the letter “M” — the em dash is emphatic, agile, and still largely undefined. Sometimes it indicates an afterthought. Other times, it’s a fist pump. You might call it the bad boy, or cool girl, of punctuation. A freewheeling scofflaw. A rebel without a clause.
Situation Normal is written by a human being — me. My stories are slice of (my) life humor, so the idea that they’re written by AI is bizarre. Then again, these are bizarre times, so maybe the em dash police are on trend. For shits and giggles, I asked Claude — the most creative AI out there, allegedly — to write its version of my most recent post about eating at the Munch Box, a burger joint where Charles Manson used to hang out.
The neon sign flickered against the darkening San Fernando Valley sky as I pulled into the Munch Box parking lot. This corner of Chatsworth held secrets in its greasy air — stories whispered about who once sat in these very booths decades ago, when the world was different and danger wore a different face.
I ordered the chili cheese fries and a burger, sliding into a cracked vinyl booth. The fries arrived drowning in orange cheese and thick chili, the kind of comfort food that makes you forget the weight of history. Each bite was perfectly salty, the cheese stretching between my fingers as I lifted another forkful.
The hamburger was simple perfection — charred beef, crisp lettuce, tangy pickles on a soft bun. Around me, families laughed and teenagers shared milkshakes, their voices echoing off the retro walls. Whatever shadows once lingered here had long since been replaced by the simple joy of good food and ordinary moments.
Sometimes the best stories are the ones being written right now.
Four paragraphs, two em dashes — incontrovertible proof of AI writing! Case closed.
The weird thing about the em dash police is that they tend to be the sort of people who write social media posts about how AI outputs are plagiarism because commercial large language models like Claude and ChatGPT were trained on works written by humans. The em dash police might be right about the plagiarism charge. But if they are, then they’re wrong about the em dash, since the AI, in their view, is regurgitating human work. Or, maybe the em dash is an AI hallucination. But if that’s true, how do you explain Emily Dickinson, aka the em dash queen, who died more than a century before AI was born?
Which brings me to sad data point. A majority of Americans read at or below the level expected for 6th grade students. Put another way, a majority of Americans can’t comprehend an Emily Dickinson poem. I believe the em dash police when they say they rarely — or never — see the em dash in the wild. But here’s the subtext of that assertion: I don’t read very much.
Of course, it’s easy to tell people to read a book; teaching them to read is more difficult. Defund the em dash police is a nice slogan, but funding education is the way. Or, at least education used to the way before AI. Supposedly, students are using AI to write their papers, while teachers are using AI to grade those papers. As a guy who always preferred the essay to the exam, that’s disheartening. But as a guy who has read a book or two about moral panics, I’m skeptical about the Spy vs. Spy narrative of AI in education.
I’m also skeptical of the AI police. Their accusations stink of copy and paste writing. Which begs the question — are the em dash police using AI to write their posts? Probably not. But I wish they would. They’re much more likely to stumble onto something original by copying humanity’s collective literary output than they are copying each other.
A book for people who 💙 this (human-written) newsletterI wrote a novel called Not Safe for Work. Like everything you read here, it’s based on my personal experience and funny as hell. If you love Situation Normal, there’s an 11 in 10 chance you’ll laugh your butt off reading Not Safe for Work — a slacker noir murder mystery set against the backdrop of the porn industry at the dawn of Web 2.0.
Not Safe for Work is available at Amazon and all the other book places.
*The ebook is .99, so you can’t go too far wrong. Just sayin’.
Shout out time!A big thank you to — the newest paid subscriber at Situation Normal! Rich, check your mail because good vibes are headed your way.
With the support of paying subscribers, I’m able to make Situation Normal stories available for free. That means a handful of people underwrite joy for thousands of strangers — a beautiful thing. If you can help, please consider upgrading now.
IAUA: I ask, you answer
Are you human? AI-written answers only.
Have you had any run-ins with the em dash police? Tell your story.
Read any good books lately? No wrong answers, but Not Safe for Work is the right answer.
What cause would inspire you to go full-vigilante? Deputize yourself!
Rate and review the AI’s story about the Munch Box. Go deep.
