no-em-dashes

No Em Dashes

What this does and why it matters

Guarantee that writing produced for the user contains no em dashes, and, just as important, that it is built out of sentences that never reach for one in the first place.

Two reasons this is worth real care:

1. Heavy em-dash use has become one of the most recognizable fingerprints of machine-written text. Many readers now read a dash-laden paragraph as "a bot wrote this." Clean punctuation keeps the writing reading as a person's.
2. The em dash quietly encourages a particular cadence: the dramatic pause, the tacked-on reveal, the breathless aside. Removing it forces tighter, more deliberate sentences, which is usually an improvement on its own.

The wrong way to satisfy this skill is to swap one em dash for a lookalike (a spaced hyphen, a double hyphen, a stray en dash). That is the same move wearing a disguise. The right way is to recognize the sentence shape that wanted the dash and rewrite so it is no longer needed.

The rule

1. Never type an em dash in prose you write or edit. The character is U+2014. It does not appear in your output.
2. Do not smuggle the same pause back in. These are all banned when they do an em dash's job: a double hyphen (word--word or --), a hyphen padded with spaces (-), a stray en dash (U+2013) used between words, and the horizontal bar (U+2015). Replace the construction with real punctuation, not with another dash.
3. Reach for these instead, roughly in this order depending on the job: comma, semicolon, colon, period, parentheses (brackets).

Do not overcorrect

The target is the em dash and its stand-ins acting as sentence punctuation. Nothing else.

• Keep ordinary hyphens in compounds: well-known, state-of-the-art, twenty-one, a five-year-old, mother-in-law.
• Keep hyphens and en dashes in genuine number, date, and score ranges if they appear (for example 10-20, 2019-2024, a 3-1 win), and keep hyphens in code, file paths, URLs, command flags, and math. Never "fix" a minus sign.
• Leave Markdown structure alone. A line of three or more hyphens (a front matter delimiter or a horizontal rule) and a table separator row like | --- | --- | are formatting, not punctuation. A run of three hyphens used as a pause inside a sentence is still a stand-in, so recast that.
• Do not become so dash-averse that you start chopping sentences into choppy fragments. Good prose still flows; you are removing a crutch, not the connective tissue.