"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college," said Kurt ...

When you’re writing by hand, a hyphen and a dash can look pretty similar, although the meanings differ. You might throw in a hyphen to link two well-known words or add a dash—for impact, of course.

The em dash has long been a favorite punctuation mark of writers everywhere. This lengthier dash can replace a comma or a colon. It’s also sometimes used to sum up info at the end of the sentence, to ...

There's a punctuation mark that most people have never heard of or noticed, even though they've probably seen it in print a thousand times. It's called the en dash. And it's a great example of how ...

It’s rare that a punctuation mark becomes grist for the online rumor mill. But recently, an uptick in focus on AI and its impacts has brought a Blake Lively-esque level of attention to the em dash, ...

The extra-long hyphen known as the em dash is common in AI-generated text. While some writers have responded by choosing to avoid the punctuation mark, others are fighting back. If you're reading ...

For nearly 20 years, Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty has been tackling grammar myths with the grace and patience this columnist can only aspire to. On her wildly popular podcast and blog, “Grammar Girl’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you're reading something that was generated by AI, there may be signs. A chatbot might delve into or conceptualize or leverage a topic or overuse adjectives and transition words that humans rarely ...