What’s the verdict — Em-dashes?
I’m tired of having to remove em-dashes from my 100% human-written content. If I had a penny for every time I've been called out for using AI to write, I would have 3 pennies, but it’s crazy that it's happened 3 times in the past 6 months.
There’s a certain ‘standard’ in professional writing that was set before AI, then mimicked by AI… and now, I can no longer tell if I am writing like AI or if AI is writing like me. I miss the time when my em dashes and “It’s not A, it’s B” sentence structures were not incriminating.
So, for everyone who is currently struggling or is unaware, here is my not-so-exhaustive list of AI phrases and patterns to remove from your content:
- “Quietly”
- “Seismic shifts”
- It’s less like A, and more like B
- It’s not A. It’s B. And it’s causing C.
- Excessive use of colons (are colons the new em-dash?)
- Saying “actually” a lot
- “But here’s the thing:”
- The rule of three :(
Do you remove AI writing/speech patterns from your work? Any other ‘AI tells’ that I’ve missed?
I’ll end this post with my verdict — I love me an em-dash, and am beginning to love the occasional grammatical error.