BoSacks Speaks Out; The Em Dash Is Not the Villain—It’s the Canary

The New York Times just lobbed a linguistic grenade: ChatGPT uses too many em dashes. Cue the pearl-clutching. Apparently, this humble squiggle is now a red flag for robot prose, a syntactic scarlet letter. So I did what any ink-stained untrained writer skeptic would do: I dug in. I researched the em space. Not to defend the bots, but to understand the fuss.

And here’s the kicker, I didn’t know the em dash was one of the most human marks on the page. Turns out, it’s practically literary DNA. Dickens wielded it like a saber. Dickinson turned it into breath. Stephen King’s characters practically speak in dashes. It’s the punctuation of interruption, of thought mid-flight. It’s messy, organic, alive.

So why the sudden panic over a punctuation mark? Because the em dash isn’t just a line, it’s a fault line. It’s become a proxy for a much bigger fight: who owns language in the age of AI, and who gets to define what “real writing” looks like.

And I’ll admit, I’ve been part of the problem.

I never went to J-school. I’ve lectured at a few, sure, but I’m a field-trained, ink-splattered contrarian who learned the craft of writing by doing, not diagramming. And when it comes to the em dash, I’ve long been a reluctant participant. I use it, occasionally, but never with confidence. It always feels like punctuation cosplay, like I’m borrowing someone else’s rhythm.

Truth is, I’ve harbored a quiet prejudice against the em dash. Not out of malice, but suspicion. If I see more than three in an article, I assume it was written by a bot. It’s become a kind of uncanny tell, a syntactic fingerprint of machine-made prose. And until recently, I was fine with that assumption.

But then I read the Times piece, and something shifted. I saw the dash not as a glitch, but as a ghost. A remnant of human rhythm. Dickens used it. Dickinson practically inhaled it. It’s not just punctuation, it’s breath, interruption, thought mid-leap.

So yes, I stand corrected. Or sit, depending on the chair and the mood. The em dash isn’t the enemy. It’s a relic of real writing. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time I gave it a little more respect.

That shift in perspective matters, because it points to a deeper cultural divide.

Writing-Writing vs. Keyboard Exhaust

The Times nailed one thing: most of what we type today isn’t writing, it’s digital exhaust. Emails, Slack pings, DoorDash updates. Functional, fleeting, forgettable. “Writing-writing”, the kind that’s crafted, edited, and meant to last, is now the exception. And that matters. Because publishers used to traffic in permanence. We sold prose like perfume, distilled, rare, and worth paying for.

Now? We’ve trained the machines on our finest vintages, and they’re bottling boxed knockoffs. We gave them our archives, our glossies, our literary DNA—and they’re selling it back as algorithmic filler.

Print Is Not Competing with TikTok

This is where the em dash debate hits paydirt. If most writing today is disposable, designed to be skimmed, swiped, and forgotten, then intentional writing is luxury. A magazine isn’t just paper. It’s permanence. It’s not competing with TikTok captions or Instagram carousels. It’s competing with cultural amnesia.

Digital platforms thrive on velocity. They reward brevity, repetition, and algorithmic mimicry. The goal isn’t depth, it’s dopamine. A TikTok caption might be clever, but it’s engineered for the scroll, not the shelf. It’s designed to vanish, not to be revisited. Print, by contrast, lingers. It asks for time. It demands attention. It offers a beginning, middle, and end, not just a loop.

Readers can still feel the difference. Between a sentence shaped by tradition and one spat out by a bot. Between a paragraph that’s been edited, argued over, and read aloud—and one that’s been stitched together by predictive text. That’s our edge. That’s our opening.

Publishers should be leaning into print’s role as artifact, not ephemera. A magazine isn’t an “everyday use-case.” It’s a ritual. A choice. A collectible. It’s the literary equivalent of vinyl, warm, intentional, and built to last. You don’t toss it in the recycling bin after one read. You stack it, archive it, pass it on.

And here’s the kicker: in a world flooded with synthetic content, authenticity becomes a luxury good. A well-edited magazine isn’t just a product, it’s proof of human touch. It’s a declaration that someone cared enough to shape the words, choose the paper, and design the experience. That’s not nostalgia, it’s strategy.

Print isn’t trying to win the attention war by shouting louder. It’s winning by whispering smarter. By being the thing that doesn’t beg for clicks, but earns rereads. By standing still while everything else scrolls past.

AI Colonialism: The Great Editorial Heist

Let’s not sugarcoat it. AI is feasting on our archives. Every digitized issue, every scanned backfile, every literary corpus, hoovered up by corporate systems that don’t credit, don’t compensate, and don’t care. This is editorial extraction. Cultural colonialism in code.

And we let it happen. We treated our archives like clutter, not capital. Meanwhile, tech giants saw the gold. They knew that centuries of editorial labor, the Dickens, the Dickinson, the niche mags and the weeklies, were the rocket fuel for their models.

The Dash Is a Signal, So Is Your Legacy

So what does a punctuation mark have to do with publishing’s future? Everything. Because if readers can still spot the fingerprint of craft, then our legacy still matters. And if “writing-writing” is rare, then we’re not just publishers, we’re purveyors of cultural luxury.

The em dash may be small, but it’s loud. It says: this writing was shaped, not scraped. It says: this sentence has a soul. And it reminds us that our archives aren’t training data, they’re treasure.

Publishers, wake up. If AI can make a dash controversial, imagine the power in your entire editorial legacy. Protect it. Monetize it. Treat it like the cultural capital it is.