On November 14, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted on social media, “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do!

What could be better than an em dash? They pepper my writing, adding dramatic pauses and emphasizing my biggest points. I ...

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The em dash — that long, elegant punctuation mark used to create a dramatic pause, seen on either side of this clause — used to be a sign of a thoughtful writer, but instead it's become a common ...

People are treating the presence of em dashes, especially if they're used in abundance, as one of the biggest tells if something was written by large language models. Of course, just because a piece ...

You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. It's about to become harder to spot when someone has used ChatGPT. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said ...

Theo W. Tobel ’27 — a Crimson Editorial editor — is a Philosophy and Neuroscience concentrator in Dunster House. But there is something far worse that LLMs are doing: They are taking away the em dash ...

Why this is important: Punctuation might seem negligible, but it plays a crucial role in writing tone, readability, and professionalism. For many users, such as writers, students, and professionals, ...

I’ve been teaching English for more than twenty years, long enough to watch punctuation trends come and go like fashion. The Oxford comma had its civil war. The semicolon had its fall from grace. But ...