On Pauses and Inheritance

I grew up reading books in my grandfather’s balcony while he read the newspaper, every afternoon. My little ottoman would sit next to his plastic chair for four hours every day. Even decades after retiring from his career as a Professor of English, some of those afternoons would involve him teaching me how to use among other things — the past perfect tense, and the em dash correctly.

I’m very new to this blog pursuit, but if you look back at my first post, you will see that I’ve used the em dash exactly six times. To the eye of a person born in the generation Z, this has become a clear sign of the usage of AI, the lovely ChatGPT. When I say lovely, I don’t mean sarcasm or mockery — it is indeed lovely. As a law student who has over two hundred cases to study every semester, it’s less a shortcut and more a support system. Still, to collapse a punctuation mark that predates modern computing into a shorthand for dishonesty feels not just inaccurate, but unfair.

The em dash does a kind of quiet, difficult work that no other punctuation mark can manage. It pauses without stopping, interrupts without ending, holds two thoughts together without forcing them into hierarchy. A comma is too soft, a full stop too final, parentheses too apologetic. The em dash allows language to breathe — to pivot, to confess, to correct itself mid-thought. It mirrors the way we actually think — in detours, in interruptions, in moments of sudden clarity. That is why nothing replaces it, and why those who love it tend to use it often — not out of excess, but out of precision.

Machines aim for completion, the em dash makes space for incompletion — for thought still in motion. If anything, its overuse should signal a human presence — someone thinking while writing, someone unwilling to smooth every edge away.

I suspect I’ll keep using it anyway. Not as a rebellion, and certainly not as a tell, but as a habit formed long before these anxieties existed. And if my writing carries too many pauses, too many turns, too many moments where one thought interrupts another — it is only because that is how I was taught to listen to language in the first place.

Perhaps what is being mistaken for artificiality is actually inheritance. Some habits are learned slowly, across afternoons, passed down rather than programmed. The em dash is not new, nor trendy. It’s been around since the 15^th century with Shakespeare and Dickinson being the ones to popularize its use. In a world that prefers efficiency over expression, its presence can look suspicious. But suspicion, I think, says more about how we read now than how we write.