I learned about the em dash in high school and adapted it to my writing style very quickly for analysis and opinion documents. It felt natural given the amount of tangents I can go off into, particularly when including analogies for the reader’s understanding.
I was surprised to find out in my career that it was rarely used by others. Subconsciously I pulled back on how often I used it — especially when it was once suggested that frequent use could imply neurodivergence. Important and lengthy documents which I’d written and published (internally) at work still display them. On occasion there have been comments asking if I’d somehow accessed early AI models to assist in writing these works because of their presence. I think I averaged two em dashes per letter page.
I find myself on the fence with proposals like these. They have good intentions but they do not solve an issue at its core. An LLM is going to reflect one of many writing styles. If today it’s frequent em dash usage, tomorrow it could be frequent parentheses. Swapping Unicode characters becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the cat always two steps behind. The real issue is that the social contract is broken because LLM output is attempted to be passed off as human work. Review and revise that social contract instead to adapt to the existence of the new tools.