Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on Jan. 2, 2026. Click here for that audio. The semicolon has been described as a “graceful pause” in writing. But this graceful punctuation mark is being ...

There is a punctuation mark that Emily Dickinson used obsessively, that Mary Shelley deployed with abandon, that David Foster Wallace built an entire prose architecture around, and that James Baldwin ...

Gwen Egan is a digital producer at Globe Opinion. AI writing is everywhere — emails, college essays, even wedding vows — and it’s becoming increasingly important to be able to detect when a piece of ...

The extra-long hyphen known as the em dash is common in AI-generated text. While some writers have responded by choosing to avoid the punctuation mark, others are fighting back. If you're reading ...

Other redditors pointed out the irony of the situation: AI draws from high-quality human writing, so good writers are ...

Suspicious that an awkward email or stilted college essay may have been written by artificial intelligence? Some people think there’s a surefire way to tell — the em dash. Writers, journalists and ...

Forget black rhinos and the Amazon rainforest: there’s something arguably just as precious joining the endangered species list, only this time, it’s a grammatical rather than biological extinction ...

What’s happened? One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT has now been fixed. Sam Altman announced via a X post that ChatGPT will now comply when users explicitly instruct it not to use em-dashes in ...