On November 14, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted on social media, “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do!

The extra-long hyphen known as the em dash is common in AI-generated text. While some writers have responded by choosing to avoid the punctuation mark, others are fighting back. If you're reading ...

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 ...

Why this is important: Punctuation might seem negligible, but it plays a crucial role in writing tone, readability, and professionalism. For many users, such as writers, students, and professionals, ...

Gwen Egan is a digital producer at Globe Opinion. AI writing is everywhere — emails, college essays, even wedding vows — and it’s becoming increasingly important to be able to detect when a piece of ...

I’ve been teaching English for more than twenty years, long enough to watch punctuation trends come and go like fashion. The Oxford comma had its civil war. The semicolon had its fall from grace. But ...

Just a few years ago, the em dash was an ordinary form of punctuation used by writers to emphasize, interrupt and set aside ideas. (It gets its name from typesetting, historically being the exact ...

The em dash (—) is a supremely useful (and fashionable) piece of punctuation used in writing and editing, often in place of a comma, colon, or parenthesis. While you might want to utilize it to make ...

Suspicious that an awkward email or stilted college essay may have been written by artificial intelligence? Some people think there’s a surefire way to tell — the em dash. Writers, journalists and ...

Chatbots are appropriating our most common rhetorical tics. Yet when it comes to language, human creativity can’t be beat. Credit...By Rob Farmer Supported by By Vauhini Vara Vauhini Vara is the ...