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.

When you’re writing by hand, a hyphen and a dash can look pretty similar, although the meanings differ. You might throw in a hyphen to link two well-known words or add a dash—for impact, of course.

Hyphenaters used to be fearless. Bad to the bone. Unflinching in the face of multi-word adjectives that required two or even three hyphens. An editor would see the terms “anti” and “social” and “media ...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen ...