Where Data Tells the Story
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Of the many tips and tricks people are coming up with to determine whether a piece of writing has been written with a little help from AI, the world seems to have homed in on the use of one particular punctuation mark: the em dash.
Though some writers have rushed in to defend the dash — the overuse of which sits alongside pizza glue and bluebberrygate in the pantheon of things people laugh at AI about — perhaps a key reason the prevalence of the punctuation mark seems so bot-like to readers is that, as writers, Americans hardly use it.
Indeed, per a recent YouGov survey, dashes are some of the least used pieces of punctuation in Americans’ arsenals, ranking just ahead of colons and semicolons, per the poll.
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