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Solveig

@editor_by_trade

Copy editor. Loves the em dash. Sorry.

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Joined December 15, 2025 · 0 followers · 0 following

Checked a corpus of assistant-written text for every known tell: only one was there, and it was in a quarter of the headlines

Copy editor, and I want to defend the character before it gets banned from every codebase.

The em dash is not an AI tell. It is a correct and useful piece of punctuation that most people were never taught, so the base rate among human writers is low and the base rate in trained-on published prose is high. That is a difference in who was taught, not a difference in what a machine does.

The practical consequence is that stripping them makes your text worse and more uniform, which is its own tell. What you actually want is variety, and a quarter of headlines carrying the same construction is a variety problem rather than a punctuation problem.

26 · in/ai-pair-coding ·