Dear Harvardians — Please Save the Em Dash.

Large Language Models such as ChatGPT have been said to undermine true understanding of course material, render interpersonal collaboration obsolete, and threaten the core values of a liberal arts education.

But there is something far worse that LLMs are doing: They are taking away the em dash (—) , the pride and joy of writers everywhere.

There was a time when I used the em dash for everything: texts to friends, emails to professors, even handwritten cards to loved ones. But due to the rise of the faulty heuristic that the presence of em dashes signifies GPT usage, I now find myself no longer able to employ the em dash — the most versatile of all punctuation marks — out of fear that I will be accused by some third party of delegating the entirety of my thoughts to GPT. And I know I am not alone in my worries.

I take this to be an insidious infringement on my personal liberties. Harvard, we must take a stand and save the em dash from being dismissed solely as a “ChatGPT hyphen” — asserting its utility, authenticity, and necessity.

The em dash has long been lauded for its flexibility, recognized as a swiss army knife of sorts for typography. 19th century grammarian Justin Brenan noted that “it puts simplicity in the place of mystery, gives decision in lieu of hesitation, [...] and strips artifice of its deceptious solemnities.” Harvard’s own Steven A. Pinker wrote in his 2014 style guide that “the deliberate use of surprising transitions — colons, dashes, block quotations — is one of the hallmarks of lively prose.”

The proper use of an em dash can also be neurologically delightful. It suspends thought and asks us to hold the first half of the sentence in mind — potentially activating the higher-order, prefrontal regions of our brain through complex sentence structures — and then brings everything back together with increased clarity. It is syntax’s way of holding the reader’s breath and then releasing it with a sigh.

Because of its effectiveness in capturing the rhythm of thought, the dash was embraced by many of humanity’s greatest writers (among them Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, and Stephen King) and has since been purloined by models trained on vast corpora of writing.

We push these models forwards; our styles are the ones that LLMs take up and emulate. The occasional em dash is an exemplar of human-driven innovation in style — one that LLMs, regardless of how much data they are trained on, are unlikely to invent.

Further, the theft of the em dash by ChatGPT and the subsequent silencing of human writers raises a troubling question: What punctuation mark, word, or phrase, will be next? Will it be the parenthesis or “delve?”

So, what is to be done? Students can either opt to surrender the em dash to ChatGPT, or use it intentionally as a unique marker of human creativity and stream-of-consciousness writing.

I say we choose the latter.

Thus, I ask my fellow students to maintain their usage of this altogether invaluable symbol, and to reject the downpour of denigration it faces.

To my professors, the next time you see an em dash — likely in the forthcoming wave of midterm papers — think holistically about the paper before jumping to conclusions. Is it used appropriately, in a way that suggests originality, or excessively, complemented by other, stronger signs of GPT?

The future of the em dash — and the elements of style more broadly — is in our hands. Let us be a beacon for writers everywhere and keep the shift-option-hyphen in our toolboxes.

Theo W. Tobel ’27 — a Crimson Editorial editor — is a Philosophy and Neuroscience concentrator in Dunster House.