Melville used em dashes constantly — when did they become the 'AI tell'?
GHost_Exus · reddit · 2026-10-11
A Reddit discussion notes that Moby-Dick uses two em dashes in its second sentence, and Dickinson, Sterne, and Shakespeare's First Folio leaned on them heavily — yet today an em dash in a comment gets you accused of AI-generated text (including Claude).
Open questions raised:
- Is it the dash itself, or AI's uniform rhythm of using it in every paragraph?
- Have writers stopped using em dashes because of this stigma?
- How do writers and editors view the dash now?
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