Why I kept the em dash

I just launched this digital garden to showcase small projects and share opinionated takes on everything from tech to municipal governance. It’s built on Astro, deployed on Cloudflare Pages, and took less than 30 minutes to get the front page running.

Now, addressing the em dash in the room, from the landing page:

Welcome to my personal corner of the web—a quiet space for essays, working notes, and software experiments.

This is the output I got when I asked AI to turn my raw vision for this website into a short welcome message. I like it. And there are two practical reasons why I’ll continue using AI as my co-writer:

1. According to recent research, AI-generated content is more likely to be cited by AI. The area is new and retrieval algorithms are fluid, but it makes sense to me that an AI model would inadvertently correlate (through reasoning tokens) the validity of a source with the quality and style of its writing. Humans do it all the time. All else being equal, I’ll gladly accept a lift in probability that AI agents will cite my content, or at least won’t ditch it because of my imperfect English.

2. I’d like to think I have some interesting, novel ideas, and I use language simply to communicate them. If I could communicate my thoughts clearly without writing a single word, I would. For me, writing is a tool, not a medium for creativity. Unlike poets or novelists, I’m not trying to embed emotion and artistic expression into the formation of sentences and selection of words. So it makes zero sense for me not to use AI to improve my writing, and it would be ridiculous to try to hide it by removing em dashes.

And that is why I left the em dash—though I couldn’t leave it alone without an explainer.