Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being about making sure your voice is shining through and started being about making sure the AI’s “voice” is not. Even if you didn’t use it…
August 31, 2026
Hello.
Once upon a time, I used to be able to use an em dash in every other sentence to avoid overusing commas—which don’t always give my sentences the extra umph that they require anyway—and to disguise my occasional lack of knowledge of punctuation rules, too.
At a certain point, it became a stylistic choice that I felt set my writing apart from most people’s during my fanfic-writing days, since I didn’t see the other AU writers whose stories I read using it often—or at least, not as often as I did.
It was my favorite writing crutch to lean on back in the day, and while I did use it probably a bit too excessively, it at least allowed my writing to be choppy in the normal, fragmented-thought-having-human-like kind of way that always made my dialogue feel realistic and my stream of consciousness writing feel more…alive and true to the way thoughts actually form.
The em dash is conversational. It’s the written equivalent of someone pausing mid-thought, changing direction, or emphasizing something they suddenly realized mattered more than the rest of the sentence. It’s a deeply human piece of punctuation that I feel always humanizes writing.
Yet nowadays, if you use an em dash in your writing, they’ll drag you to the town square and burn you at the stake for committing the crime of using AI. Even if you didn’t.
Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being about making sure your voice is shining through and started being about making sure the AI’s “voice” is not. Even if you didn’t use it. And even though AI doesn’t have a voice because it’s just made up of a collection of human voices.
It’s like if you were cloned and then people told you to stop being you because your clone is now you, and you cannot be copying your clone, who is but a mere copy of you.
It’s ridiculous.
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