Paste AI-written text and every em dash is replaced with a comma, a hyphen, or removed — your choice — while the en dashes in number ranges are left alone. The status line tells you how many were changed.
Paste the text into the editor above and every em dash (—) is replaced with a comma, which reads most naturally in most sentences. Open the preferences to switch to a hyphen or to remove them outright. En dashes inside number ranges such as 2019–2024 are never touched, and the status line reports how many dashes were changed. Nothing leaves your browser.
From ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any editor. The dashes are replaced the moment you paste.
The default is a comma. Open the preferences (sliders icon) and set "Em dashes" to hyphen or remove if that reads better for your text.
The status line shows how many em dashes were fixed and how many smart quotes were straightened.
Click Copy Result, then skim the text once. "Remove" in particular can leave a sentence wanting a comma.
Large language models learned to write from edited books, journalism and long-form web writing, where the em dash is a favourite tool for asides and emphasis. The models reproduce that habit far more densely than any person types — most people never reach for a character that has no key on the keyboard. Since 2025 the pattern has become so recognisable that a cluster of em dashes is the first thing many readers notice in an AI draft.
No, and this tool does not claim that. Em dashes are the most visible tell, but only one of several: attentive readers and detection tools also notice evenly sized paragraphs, balanced "not only… but also" structures and a uniform rhythm. Fixing the dashes makes the text read naturally; it is not a disguise. Edit the content as well.
Comma is the safe default: most AI em dashes mark an aside or a pause, and a comma does the same job without drawing attention. Pick hyphen for informal writing where a visible pause suits the tone, such as chat messages or social posts. Pick remove when the dash was purely decorative and the sentence reads cleanly without it — then re-read, because a few sentences will want a comma or a full stop added by hand.
No. An en dash sitting between two digits is treated as a range and left exactly as it is. Only em dashes, and en dashes used as em dashes between words, are replaced. The hyphen inside compound words (well-known, co-founder) is a different character and is never touched either.
This page also switches on "Straighten quotes" by default, because curly quotes and the single-character ellipsis are the other punctuation habits that mark text as generated. They become the straight ' and " and the three-dot ... that keyboards produce. Turn it off in the preferences if your style guide calls for typographic quotes.
Yes, but it is fiddly. In Word you search for ^+ (em dash) and ^= (en dash); Google Docs needs the dash pasted into the search box or a regular expression; and both will also replace the number ranges you wanted to keep. The tool does the whole pass in one paste, skips numeric ranges automatically, and reports the count.
An em dash (—) is the long dash writers use for an aside — like this — or for an abrupt turn in a sentence. In edited prose it is common and perfectly correct. In everyday typed writing it is rare, for a simple reason: there is no em dash key. Word turns a double hyphen into one automatically; most other places people write — email, chat, social networks, CMS fields — do not. So a human draft has hyphens, commas and the occasional parenthesis, and a draft from ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini has an em dash every second sentence.
That gap is what readers learned to notice. During 2025 “the em dash is how you spot ChatGPT” went from a copywriters’ in-joke to mainstream advice, and by 2026 the nuance had caught up: an em dash is a signal, not proof, and plenty of careful writers use them. But density is the problem, not existence. A proposal, a cold email or a LinkedIn post with four em dashes in six sentences reads as generated before anyone has absorbed what it says. This page fixes the density in one paste and leaves the decision about tone to you.
The replacement also absorbs the spaces around the dash, so word — word and word—word both come out the same way.
The results—which surprised us—were clear. becomes The results, which surprised us, were clear. A pair of dashes around an aside becomes a pair of commas; a single trailing dash becomes a single comma. This reads naturally in the great majority of sentences, which is why it is the default.Ship it—then fix it. becomes Ship it - then fix it. A spaced hyphen is how people type a pause when they are writing quickly, so it suits chat, comments and informal posts. It is still a visible pause, just a human-looking one.Click Save—and you’re done. becomes Click Save and you’re done. The dash is dropped and the gap closes to a single space. This is the right choice when the dash was decorative, and the wrong one when it was doing the work of a colon or a full stop — always re-read after choosing it.2019–2024, pages 10–15, 9–5. The tool looks for a digit on both sides of an en dash and, if it finds them, leaves the range alone. The dash here is correct punctuation, not an AI habit.well-known, co-founder, e-mail. The hyphen (-) is a different character from both dashes and is never touched.- or -- is already ordinary keyboard punctuation, so there is nothing to replace. If an AI draft wrote -- instead of a real dash, it stays as typed.One case is replaced on purpose: an en dash (–) with words on either side. Some models, Claude in particular, use a spaced en dash where others use an em dash. It carries the same tell, so it gets the same treatment.
The same training data that taught the models to love em dashes taught them typographic quotation marks — “curly” quotes and the single-character ellipsis (…). Keyboards produce the straight versions, so a quickly typed message has straight quotes and three separate dots. This page turns the Straighten quotes option on alongside the dash replacement, and the status line counts those changes too. If you are preparing text for a publication whose house style wants typographic quotes, switch it off in the preferences; the dash setting is independent.
Cold email. Aim for zero. A sales email is supposed to look like it was typed in thirty seconds by a busy person, and busy people do not type em dashes. Use comma mode and then shorten the sentences; the full approach is in how to format AI cold emails for Gmail and Outlook.
LinkedIn posts. One or two is fine and reads as deliberate. A cluster does not. Comma mode, then switch on Keep bold for the line you want to stand out — the LinkedIn formatting guide covers why plain bold does not survive there.
Upwork and freelance proposals. Comma mode. Clients read dozens of proposals and have learned the tell faster than anyone; a proposal that reads as unedited AI output is the one that gets skipped.
Reports, essays and formal documents.Here the em dash is often legitimate. If you want to keep them and only straighten the quotes, set “Em dashes” to Keep in the preferences and the rest of the cleanup still runs.
You can, and it is worth knowing how. In Word, open Find and Replace (Ctrl+H) and search for ^+, which is Word’s code for an em dash; ^=finds an en dash. Google Docs has no code, so you paste the dash character itself into the search box, or tick “Use regular expressions” and search for \s*—\s* to swallow the spacing as well. The catch in both is that a blind replace also rewrites every number range in the document, so you either do a second pass to repair them or replace one at a time. The tool above makes one pass, skips the ranges, handles the surrounding spaces and tells you the count — and it does the quotes in the same paste.
The replacement runs in your browser with client-side JavaScript. Your text is never sent to a server, stored or logged. No account, no limits, no watermark.