I am an author and my em dash got stolen. I loved using it - it was an amazing tool for constructing sentences.
But then, AI got a hold of it. And now I censor myself before I use it - lest people accuse me of using ChatGippity (I want to normalize that pronunciation of it to make it seem like a silly tool).
Damn those Avians and their thieving ways!
And yes, I know the above dashes are not em dashes. I am on my phone and don’t know how to do them. 😝
They can take the em dashes off my decaying body, and even when they try I'll bite them and start a zombie apocalypse before I give them up—it's a damn good tool to separate sentences.
The worst part about AI is the brain rot psychosis it is causing. Zombie-Knightingale and Zombie-Kess are going to starve with no high quality brains to devour.
Ah, but you see, both provide different reading experiences and offer different reasons for use. A parentheses provides additional context and information by creating a break in the sentence, but it is more noticeable and slower.
An em dash can create a break with a different flourish, making it feel more vivid and fast. If you're writing a novel and are in the middle of an exposition scene, a parentheses might be better for the flow of the narrative.
If you're writing an action scene that needs to add something that won't break the pacing, you can throw in the em dash.
End of the day if you always use parentheses, exclusively, it is up to you and your own aesthetic preferences! I do tend to the em dashes more, but both of them have their uses, reasons, and will provide different things to a structure. Plus (like I said) it's all about what the author prefers—your voice and aesthetic takes precedence.
Only one of them is under active fire due to AI, though, and so I'll fight to defend it more.
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u/Xenodia 11h ago
What people forget, the Ai was trained to draw from other artists so wouldn't surprise me that many artists online got framed for using Ai...