Why AI writing is full of em dashes (and how to fix it)
By the AI Text Formatter team ·
Ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for three paragraphs and count the dashes. There will be an em dash — the long one — every second or third sentence, doing the job of a comma, a colon, a pair of parentheses or a full stop. Humans typing in a hurry almost never produce one. That gap is the most recognised sign of generated text, and fixing it is a one-paste job once you know what to replace the dash with. The em dash remover does the replacement; this post is about why the habit exists and how to choose.
Where the habit comes from
Language models learn to write from what they read, and the text they read most carefully — edited books, long-form journalism, essays, good technical writing — is text that was typeset. Typesetters and copy editors love the em dash. It marks an aside without the formality of parentheses, a turn in the sentence without the weight of a colon, and it does both in one keystroke on a professional keyboard layout. In edited prose, a dash every few sentences is unremarkable.
Everyday typed writing is different for a mechanical reason: there is no em dash key. Word turns a double hyphen into one; almost nowhere else does. In email, chat, forms, social posts and proposals, a person who wants a pause types a comma, or a hyphen with spaces, or starts a new sentence. So the human baseline in those places is close to zero em dashes, and a model trained on edited prose lands four in six sentences.
Two more things push the frequency up. Models are rewarded during training for text that reads as fluent and well structured, and the dash is a cheap way to make a sentence feel shaped. And the same training data taught them the rest of the typographic toolkit — curly quotes, the single-character ellipsis — so the dashes rarely arrive alone.
Why readers notice
Through 2025 the em dash went from a copywriter's in-joke to mainstream advice: "that's how you spot ChatGPT". By 2026 the nuance caught up — plenty of careful writers use em dashes, and a single one proves nothing — but the density still gives it away. A cold email with three dashes in four sentences reads as unedited AI output before the reader has absorbed a word of it. On LinkedIn, screenshots of dash-heavy posts are their own genre. In an Upwork proposal, a client who reads thirty proposals a day has learned the pattern faster than anyone.
It is a signal, not proof, and the fix is not to eliminate every dash from your writing for ever. It is to bring the density down to what a person would have typed in that place.
Comma, hyphen or nothing: how to choose
Each em dash in an AI draft is doing one of a few jobs, and the right replacement depends on the job.
An aside in the middle of a sentence — "the results — which surprised us — were clear" — becomes a pair of commas: "the results, which surprised us, were clear." This is the commonest case and the reason comma is the default mode in the tool.
A pause before a conclusion — "we tested it for a week — it held up" — becomes a comma in formal writing or a spaced hyphen in informal writing: "we tested it for a week - it held up". The hyphen is how people type a pause when they are writing quickly, so it suits chat, comments and social posts. In an email or a document it looks careless; use the comma or a full stop.
A decorative flourish — "Click Save — and you're done" — wants nothing at all: "Click Save and you're done." Remove mode handles these. Re-read afterwards, because a dash that was quietly doing the work of a colon leaves a sentence wanting one.
A range — "2019–2024", "pages 10–15", "9–5" — is an en dash between numbers and is correct punctuation, not an AI habit. The tool leaves these alone on purpose; a blind Find and Replace in Word does not.
A spaced en dash – like this – is Claude's variant of the same tell, and gets the same treatment as an em dash.
The companion tells
Fix the dashes and the next thing readers notice is the rest of the typographic set: "curly" quotation marks and the single-character ellipsis (…), which keyboards do not produce either. The em dash remover switches on Straighten quotes by default for that reason — they become the straight ' and " and the three-dot ... that a person would have typed — and reports the count alongside the dashes.
Beyond punctuation, the tells are structural: paragraphs of identical length, "not only… but also" constructions, a bold lead-in on every bullet, an opening line that explains what the answer is about to do. No tool fixes those. Shorten some sentences, lengthen one paragraph, delete the opener, and the text starts to read as written rather than generated.
Doing it in Word or Google Docs instead
You can. In Word, Find and Replace (Ctrl+H) with ^+ finds em dashes and ^= finds en dashes. Google Docs needs the dash character pasted into the search box, or a regular expression such as \s*—\s* to swallow the spacing too. The catch in both is that a blind replace also rewrites every number range in the document, so you either repair those afterwards or replace one at a time. The em dash remover makes one pass, skips the ranges, tidies the surrounding spaces, straightens the quotes in the same paste and tells you how many it changed — and nothing leaves your browser.
For the complete clean-up of an AI draft — the markdown symbols, the hidden characters, the citation markers — the remove ChatGPT formatting page does the dashes as part of the same pass.