A Dash – to the En[d] (of the year)

It's 31st December! And I'm sad. Sad because I have left it far too late to produce a something like this or even something like this. 

Instead, I'm here to talk about this:

—

...but also, this:

–
!

My introduction to the em dash came in 2020, at the hands of either Jarret Crader or FM Geist... or possibly both of them, simultaneously. I'd just crowdfunded Pariah Volume 1 (Volume 2 dropping any day now... any day...) and engaged their services as (the two were collaborating as MoonRat Conspiracy).

Before their timely intervention, my parenthetical clauses were a mess of commas and/or hyphens. I put this down to the fact that there's no fucking em dash button on a normal keyboard (pro tip: holding down "alt", type 0151 on the numeric keypad) or on your phone (pro tip: double tap a hyphen, watch it transform into an em dash!) and the last time I had produced any writing that underwent any degree of grammatical scrutiny essays were written by hand. 

Colour me ashamed to be a late Gen X-er... with my pitiful nostalgia for less efficient writing methods...

I had been given a superpower, but five years later it's time to return it.

The reason?

Artificial Intelligence.

Rage Against the Machine(s)

It was late: I was pissed-off that a low-effort, AI-generated post on r/osr had absorbed a substantial amount of time. I scrolled through the comments until I found one confirming my instincts, here's what it said: 

This reads so blatantly like ChatGPT output. 

• It wasn’t about being a hero; it was about being clever enough to make it out alive. 
• It’s not just nostalgia. 
• The dungeon in these games is not just a setting – it is a conversation. 

So many em dashes. So many groups of threes. So many other tells. That final sentence/call to action. It's irrefutable.

It's fine to use ChatGPT to brainstorm an outline then write from that, or to polish up your own writing input. When you do that, it doesn't read like direct output. If you just use the output directly from a general prompt, you get pretty generic output and you have to edit it and put it in your own voice -- otherwise, it just reads like rote noise. And it's really hard to tell what the human voice in there is when that happens; how much you personally put thought into the prompt and ideas.

Edit: basically, hide it better. Put a little more effort in.

I've emboldened the element that caught my eye: until that very moment, it had not occurred to me that em dashes were a sign of a LLM at work. I researched this further, and found this post (again in reddit):

Is anyone avoiding the em dash because it has become an indicator of “written by AI”?

The rabbit hole goes deep, my friends: first they came for our artists, now they're coming for punctuation...

Then again, never mind

I'd already been thinking about embracing the en dash as an alternative.It seemed like a good alternative, and it's helps demarcate parenthetical clauses in some of the world's most widely read newspapers. Instead of cramming the words together—like this—it gave them a little more room. As you can tell – if you have any powers of observation at all – I'm already warming to them.

But suddenly it hit me...  

The dungeon in these games is not just a setting – it is a conversation. 

Not the lukewarm take, who cares about that: but that's not an em dash, it's an en dash!

Suddenly I was right back where I started: a middle-aged autodidact with poor copy-editing skills.

What is this All About?

I know what you're thinking: this would have read so much better if I'd engineered copilot to produce an amusing end-of-year post. It's highly doubtful it would have been about analphabetic symbols. But we're striving to live deliciously, are we not? And the first step is living authentically. And my authentic self has been thing about grammar.

Perhaps an odd choice on which to end 2025, but I want to highlight these posts by Sam Sorenson. they've been genuinely helpful as a slowly collate the notes I've been making during my hiatus into proper RPG texts, and I think they should be read more widely:

Ten tangible tips for editing your RPG manuscript:
https://samsorensen.blot.im/ten-tangible-tips-for-editing-your-rpg-manuscript

Ten more tangible scripts for editing your RPG manuscript:
https://samsorensen.blot.im/ten-more-tangible-tips-for-editing-your-rpg-manuscript

Ten intangible tips for dev-editing your RPG manuscript
https://samsorensen.blot.im/ten-intangible-tips-for-development-editing-your-rpg-manuscript

I'm excited for 2026. This year has been tough for lots of people – for myriad reasons – but a New Year is always a promise of hope renewed, even if that hope fades swiftly*. Bring it on.

Subscribe to my Substack, hire an editor.

* I wasn't joking about en dashes for – like it or not – I'm choosing AP over Chicago! 

 

Links

Festive Anomalous Media 
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2024/12/festive-anomalous-media-post.html

GLOG: a warning from the future
https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-glog-warning-from-future.html