'You're all wrong about the em dash — my emotional support punctuation.'

I never meant to care this much about punctuation. 

Truly, I didn't. I wanted to be the kind of person who sees a spicy TikTok comment thread or inflammatory headline and scrolls on by with grace like a functional adult.

But then came the great em dash discourse of 2025.

There's been a flurry of think pieces and hot takes claiming the em dash isn't just dramatic punctuation anymore — it's a red flag. A sign your copy was written by ChatGPT.

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The logic? Apparently bots love a dash. AI tools sprinkle them in to mimic natural flow, so now anytime a sentence breaks with flair or breathes a little, people assume it wasn't written by a human with a brain and a deadline and a very strong opinion about pacing — but by a machine.

To which I say: clearly you've never met a writer with anxiety and a word count limit.

I tried to ignore it. But then I saw this beautiful, dash-loving monologue from Louis Hanson. "Justice for the em dash," he proudly declared. And suddenly, I felt seen.

The video launched an internal dialogue of my own so intense it could only be exorcised by a… 780-word opinion piece defending a piece of punctuation. Because this — apparently — is who I am now. A woman, standing in front of a sentence, asking it to let her use just one more em dash. 

And look — I know this is a very ridiculous and deeply stupid hill to die on. I know most people read a sentence and don't even notice what it's held together with. I know the average reader is not conducting a mental inventory of hyphen usage versus dashes versus dramatic flair.

But I notice. Because this is my job.

Let's be very clear: the em dash is not rogue. It's not a "sign of AI". It's grammatically correct. It's in The Chicago Manual of Style, The New Yorker, The Guardian — and in every article I've filed two minutes before a 5PM deadline while halfway through my fourth oat cappuccino and an existential crisis. 

If using an em dash makes you think I'm a bot, then fine — beep boop. But just know this: I am a highly caffeinated, emotionally unstable writer with trust issues and a deep-seated love for grammatically sanctioned chaos. And the em dash? She gets me.

She is the punctuation mark of the overthinker. The drama queen. The person who starts a sentence with confidence — only to spiral mid-thought, take a sharp left, add three side comments, and somehow still land it. She's not lazy. She's layered.

This punctuation mark understands me better than most men — and frankly, that's not even the most embarrassing part of this paragraph. Unlike most men I've dated, the em dash knows when to pause. When to let me rant without interruption. She doesn't demand I get to the point faster, or accuse me of being "too much," or suggest that I just "use a comma and move on."

No — she lets the sentence breathe. She holds space for nuance, contradiction, backtracking, and emotion. She lets things get a little messy — a little complicated — and still trusts it'll come together in the end.

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I don't use em dashes because I can't write a clean sentence — I use them because I won't. Because sometimes a comma feels too casual, and a full stop feels like giving up. Because sometimes — and I say this with love — your idea needs a pause. A punctuation mark that says: "Hang on, babe — we're not done yet."

And yes — I know what you're thinking — "How many em dashes can one girl use in a single piece?" And to that I say: all of them. Every last one. I will em dash my way through this life and into the grave. And my headstone? It'll have an em dash, too.

"She came — she spiralled — she submitted her copy five minutes late." RIP.

The em dash is not "giving ChatGPT". It's giving writer who spent 17 minutes choosing between a comma and a breakdown. So if you see one in my work, don't assume a robot wrote it. Assume I needed the sentence to reflect my inner chaos — and this one screamed the loudest. Because that's the truth.

So, long live the em dash — my emotional support punctuation, my grammatical therapist, my ride-or-die in literary delusion. May she punctuate every thought I can't quite finish — and every sentence I refuse to end like a normal person.

Feature image: HBO/Canva.