Posted on Fri 26 December 2025

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 a plugin to convert all hyphens in this blog to em—dashes. Even ones that really should just be hyphens.