Proper Punctuation is now AI

Attention, Authors: Forget Everything You Learned In Third Grade

Heads up, fellow writers: you know everything Mrs. Patterson taught you about punctuation back in elementary school? Toss it. Burn the worksheets. Because apparently, somewhere between then and now, three perfectly normal punctuation marks got reclassified as Proof You Are Using AI to Write. So let's take a look at our top culprits, shall we?

The Em Dash: Public Enemy Number One

The em dash — a punctuation mark that has existed since before your great-grandparents were born — is now "the ChatGPT hyphen." That's an actual phrase people are using. As if Emily Dickinson sat down with a laptop in 1862 and just got really into prompt engineering.

She didn't, obviously. Dickinson used em dashes like punctuation was rationed and she'd been given an unlimited supply. The em dash is arguably the most human punctuation mark there is — and yet here we are, side-eyeing it like it just walked out of a server farm.

The "evidence" for the em dash being an AI tell mostly traces back to a viral TikTok where a student claimed he failed an assignment because his professor flagged his em dash as 100% AI. Dramatic, right? Except the student turned out to be a paid ambassador for an AI-detection tool, which is a pretty important detail to leave out of your viral video.

Here's the part nobody wants to sit with: AI learned what "good writing" looks like from... hold onto your hats... actual writing. AI copied us. Not the other way around.

The Oxford Comma: Guilty of Being Correct

Next on the list: the Oxford comma. You know, the one that keeps a sentence like "I have lots of pictures of my parents, Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart" from implying your parents are secretly Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart. Add the comma back, and you're just someone with an unusually specific photo collection.

The Oxford comma has been required since Strunk & White first recommended it back in 1918 — and it's been a battleground ever since. Chicago wants it. AP doesn't. English teachers have been fighting about it at faculty meetings for over a century.

Sorry, folks, this is solid proof that the Oxford comma predates AI by over a century!

The Ellipsis: Trailing Off Is Now Suspicious

Use of ellipses predates the Oxford comma by over a decade. Chicago's first style manual in 1906 already had rules for them — though back then it called for four dots, not three. That didn't change to the standard three until 1949.

Those three little dots have meant "trailing off," "uncertainty," or "there's more I'm not saying" a century before AI... even before computers. Writers have used it to mimic hesitation, to build suspense, to let a sentence fade into something unfinished and unsettling. It shows up constantly in dialogue, in interior monologue, in any piece of writing that wants to capture how people actually think and speak — which is, notably, rarely in tidy, complete sentences.

So, Class, What Have We Learned?

Nothing, apparently, except that punctuation is now a crime scene and everyone's playing detective. So here's my actual advice, fellow authors: keep your em dashes. Use your Oxford comma. Let your sentences trail off into an ellipsis whenever the moment calls for it.

What that really means is that you paid attention in Mrs. Patterson's class.

The people accusing you of using AI because you use these? Mrs. Patterson would like a word.