What do you think of em dashes in a novel's text?
Personally, I find em dashes quite stylistic. It adds variety to the punctuations we already know: periods (.), commas (,), question (?) and exclamation marks (!), colons (:), semicolons (;) and the simple dash (-). A paragraph with multiple compound sentences that were punctuationed with just periods and commas are... Not as aesthetically pleasing as one with dashes.
What do you think?
As someone who is extremely vocal about the history of em dashes, primarily being a university english-focused writing punctuation or otherwise grammar school origin tool for formatting.
Where yes, they are an artefact of typesetting back in history where they were 'an M' amount of spacing for flexible pause and break marker usage.
There is no prior widespread implementation in casual and fantasy writing for what was originally a typographic and incidentally, academic punctuation symbol. Only now have we seen a shift into some commercial writing, and most of that was professional magazines, not webnovels. The very people who would have been expected to participate in university-level study of english writing.
Even for the people who found uses for it, it only recently applies in the subsequent contexts that it has been used in for more generalised commercial writing, it is not naturally on most keyboard which has always been an additional reason it seems artificial.
Any excuse, discussion or argument about punctuation, I could be stating for the Interrobang ‽, I could be stating for the Percontation point ⸮.
We could be talking about the Asterism ⁂, we could be talking the Paragraphos' ⸿ which would have an abundance of use in webnovel writing for very clear distinctions between speakers.
If people are complaining about variety, there are countless we could be using. If people feel one punctuation mark encompasses their whole writing style, they rely on it too much in the first place.
All in all, the original onset of the Em dash wasn't the issue. The issue came in the prevalence that came due to AI being trained on material that biased that punctuation. Large language models, people tend to forget, are PREDICTING the following text. They have been made more 'conversational' and everything, but their whole point is to try and finish sentences, that is mechanically why they mirror people.
And when that prediction software, is deciding that based on academic texts, it will include an Em dash, that immediately predisposes everyone reading, to believe there was some amount of influence by the very AI that has effectively brought 'new life' to that specific punctuation mark.
Rather than being tired of it, it invites a level of scrutiny, a level of distrust in people who use it now if their work already doesn't hit a high enough bar to be interpreted as human.
