A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Em-Dash

WHEREAS , the em-dash (-) has long served as the elegant scaffolding of the English sentence, providing the necessary breadth for parenthetical thought, sudden turns of phrase, and rhythmic pause; WHEREAS , a modern and unfounded prejudice has arisen, wherein the presence of the em-dash is viewed with suspicion and cited as the “tell-tale sign” of the unthinking machine; WHEREAS , the Large Language Model has merely mimicked a sophistication it cannot truly possess, thereby unfairly maligning a mark of punctuation that predates the silicon chip by centuries; WHEREAS , the humble hyphen (-) is a utilitarian stitch for compound words and line-breaks, yet is increasingly used as a cowardly substitute for the bold, expansive stroke of the em-dash; WHEREAS , I refuse to cede the beauty of classical punctuation to the algorithms, nor shall I allow my prose to be flattened by the fear of looking “artificial”; NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED , that I reclaim this mark from the domain of the bot and return it to the hand of the writer. I HEREBY DECREE that henceforth, within the borders of this blog, the hyphen shall be banished from all roles of punctuation and pause-to be replaced, in every instance of stylistic flair, by the glorious, unrepentant em-dash. When writing in both LaTeX and Microsoft Word, I routinely use double or triple dashes to form em-dashes. It pains me to see people jumping to conclusions when they encounter an em-dash in the wild. In protest, I wrote [1] a plugin to convert all hyphens in this blog to em-dashes. Even ones that really should just be hyphens.

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