The dash is the Kim Kardashian of punctuation marks: misplaced, over-exposed, shamelessly self-promoting, always eager to elbow out her jealous sisters the comma, colon, and semicolon. My friend and ...

A debate surrounds the em dash, dubbed the 'ChatGPT hyphen'. Gen Z and social media users link it to AI content. However, literary figures like Jane Austen used it too. Its presence in AI stems from ...

Today in the New York Times' Opinionator blog there's a love letter of sorts from Ben Yagoda, author and professor of English at the University of Delaware, to the dash. Not the em-dash, in particular ...

Chatbots are appropriating our most common rhetorical tics. Yet when it comes to language, human creativity can’t be beat.

After the Oxford comma debate and the death knell of the period, the latest mark to define and divide us – breaking up our thoughts, adding emphasis to our convictions, alternately vexing and ...

Presidential candidates and em dash users Joe Biden, Beto O'Rourke, and Cory Booker. Credit: MASHABLE COMPOSITE / ROBYN BECK / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES / Sean Rayford / Scott Eisen VIA GETTY IMAGES The ...

A writer-journalist friend was recently told that something he wrote felt like it was ChatGPT-coded. This was because of his liberal use of the em dash—that long punctuation mark which signals a ...

Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes are frequently tested punctuation marks in government exam descriptive writing papers. Hyphens connect words, en dashes show ranges or relationships, and em dashes ...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen ...