Karen Stabiner

Now that I know how fond chatbots are of the em dash — the thing I just used to convey a thought that intruded on but is connected to the main sentence — I have a confession to make.

It’s in part my fault, apparently. Watch out for the semicolon, too; I sprinkle them like salt.

I’m one of those authors whose books AI ate for lunch a few years back, making us unwitting and unwilling contributors to the chatbot writing style, if you want to call it that. At some point I might get a check to pay me for a dozen years’ work on the three books it stole, but really, there’s no way to compensate for the fallout. AI seems to think — no, it can’t think, only shuffle what real people thought — that a machine can write as well as a person can. In the process of trying, it’s compromised the very tools we use.

I taught at Columbia Journalism School for 10 years, and was surprised to learn from a second-semester student that a first-semester professor had forbidden the use of the semicolon. It was sloppy, he said. Evidence of an indecisive mind. A better writer would find a more definitive way to punctuate the space between two thoughts.

He was tenured. I was an adjunct and surprised to find myself in the classroom at all, so I did what any decent writer does and succumbed to self-doubt. I write by ear — I worshipped another adjunct who insisted that all writing was musical — only to find that someone higher up the academic ladder believed I’d been doing it wrong, forever.

Then I did the other thing any decent writer does: I defended myself. Banning the semicolon seemed rather hard-line, I said. I joked about the possibility that our conflicting attitudes were gender-based. I softened my indignation with a reference to my West Coast woo-woo roots: Everything is related to everything, hence the semicolon, even though my childhood was spent in the decent and rule-bound Midwest.

I told my students that they should try what sounded right to them as long as they didn’t sacrifice clarity. There are lots of melodies out there.
But back to em dashes. I’ve just finished writing a book that’s as full of them as the other books I’ve written over 40-plus years, so I’m stymied by what to do next, because it seems my writing style now invites suspicion. I could go back through 63,000 words and change the em dashes to I don’t know what. Periods. Commas, which lose the half-beat hesitation a semicolon provides — and might splice together two independent clauses. Or colons, which are too emphatic. Or I could run a disclaimer on the title page: No AI programs were used in the creation of this book.

That, of course, puts me at greater risk. “The lady doth protest too much”: Some readers will assume that I did, in fact, collaborate with a machine.

Maybe we need a certification office whose logo would sit right above the publisher’s on a book’s spine, so that anyone who still bought books could tell at a glance if a human being consumed too much coffee and developed turtleneck in the service of storytelling. Even as I type, paranoia reaches out to tap me on the shoulder. Who’s certifying the certifiers to make sure they aren’t letting ChatGPT do the analysis?

By the way, the Copilot feature on Word, which I cannot turn off no matter what I try, just butted in to highlight “at a glance.” Readers would be better served, I’m told, if I used “briefly” or “immediately,” neither of which is exactly what I meant.

I worked with a magazine editor, in the very long ago, who seemed really to enjoy his work, particularly the part about choosing exactly the right word. We’d go through the almost-final draft, paragraph by paragraph, to address passages or even single words he felt were not quite right. I’d suggest a change or two and then surrender to insecurity, because this was early in the game for me, and I had a small case of impostor syndrome. Clearly he had the right word in mind, and whatever it was was OK with me.

His answer was always the same. This is your piece, he’d say, and I know you can come up with it. He’d repeat the point he thought I was trying to make, and I’d suggest a few more options until I hit the right one.

I’ve been grateful to him ever since, although now I hold him partly responsible for my willingness to use em dashes and semicolons.

When I found out about my Columbia colleague’s ban on semicolons, I checked a few books by favorite authors of mine and — lo and behold — found em dashes and semicolons galore and felt redeemed. Yes, I use them too often, and yes, I’ve occasionally done a punctuation reread to see if some of them are superfluous. I left all of them in this essay on purpose, so that commenters can complain about how many I use or accuse me of being a front for ChatGPT.

I’m not saying everyone needs to write without AI assistance. I’ve read about job seekers who use AI to thwart AI applicant-screening systems and am all for it, but that’s about survival tactics, not self-expression. I am saying we ought to value the human voice the way we value any other natural resource, and be wary of pretenders. But em dashes don’t prove that software wrote something. Affectless language, the lack of anything like a writer’s idiosyncratic style, is the dead giveaway that nobody’s home. Writing that’s as boring as your dullest relative was likely written by a chatbot that can’t see, hear, taste, smell, touch — or feel. Settle for that and we’re all the poorer for it.
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Karen Stabiner is the author, most recently, of “Generation Chef: Risking It All for a New American Dream.”