Machine maketh the em

The em dash—now heavily stigmatized as a hallmark of, and made infamous by, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT—might have risen to public attention in the past few years. It is not, however, a recent invention—tracing its roots back to the printing press of the 15th century.

The em dash was born out of necessity as the written word proliferated with the advent of the revolutionary printing press and became accessible to the common public, replacing the books and manuscripts that had previously required painstaking human effort to replicate and maintain.
Printers needed a way to visually signify a sudden break in thought, a dialogue shift, or an interruption that a comma simply could not bear.

How ironic is it, then, that the punctuation mark which originated with the first era of literary automation now sees a decline in its authentic usage during the latest automated revolution brought about by LLMs.

Formative suspensions

Growing up, I was immersed in a vast variety of books. I still remember coming home in the first grade when my dad presented me with my first-ever encyclopaedia, brought back from a business trip. By the fourth grade, my taste expanded from encyclopaedias into the realm of fiction—Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, to name a few prominent examples.

As I grew up, I started reading more challenging works, and thus stumbled upon the — character. This, to me, was a fascinating language mechanic, seldom seen but utilized in a multitude of ways, and seemingly, always elegant in its usage.
And so, the elder cousin to the hyphen—whose name I would not learn for years to come—became an obsession. And although the semicolon struck me as no less elegant a language mechanic, it did not have as strong an impression on my younger self.

Digression: the imitation game

I learnt the craft of writing primarily by reading voraciously, attempting to mentally capture a frame of reference for the passages I found elegant, and then to recreate that feel in the writing I did for my homework, assignments, and the occasional short story or diary entry.
This practice yielded some recognition and helped me win a few writing competitions in school—most notably a rank of around 1150 in an International English Olympiad when I was 15.

All I did then, and what I still attempt to do in my day job, is to emulate the authors of the bodies of work that I admire. Nowadays, that reading material is largely made up of complex technical blogs. The practice of absorbing and replicating the rhythm of good technical writing is serving me well. At least, that’s what I like to think.
I certainly cannot replicate James Clavell’s rich, detailed prose that floats across entire chapters. As a saving grace, I am able to imitate that alabaster-esque language for my internal monologue.

Yet, this very essay is an anomaly. Despite this section—for the most part—encapsulating my self-congratulatory nostalgia, I have not undertaken a written, reflective commentary like this in ages. The last time I wrote something along these lines—and not stopped at merely thinking of things—would have been at least two or three years ago, added to the pages of a personal diary I maintained briefly.
Here, I am not trying to optimize for readability scores or technical precision; I am mostly trying to let the words—and as is apparent, the em dashes—flow as they come (with intense revising, of course; I am not fooling anyone).
In fact, I had this title for this blog in mind for weeks now, before finally committing to writing it out.

C for comma, and compromise

To clarify, I have been purposefully liberal with my usage of the em dash in this piece—where else would I use it with carefree abandon if not here? I primarily use the em dash to “expand” a topic, injecting additional context into the current narrative thread.

In most instances now, for my technical blogs, I sprinkle it in once or twice at the maximum. It typically appears in the second half, by which point the reader is (hopefully) invested enough, and cognizant of the fact that the content is not AI-generated. I do, however, use AI for content review and validating logical correctness.

And so, for me now—a professional who must write, articulate, and attempt to perform in the public sphere while representing my organization in a clear, unambiguous voice—the (em)ighty have fallen. The landscape of writing has shifted, the algorithms have claimed my favourite punctuation mark, and there is little I can do about it.