Novelist Cormac McCarthy has spent twenty years editing what feels like the opposite of a novel: scientific papers by faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute. Some of the scientists he ...

It’s rare that a punctuation mark becomes grist for the online rumor mill. But recently, an uptick in focus on AI and its impacts has brought a Blake Lively-esque level of attention to the em dash, ...

A debate surrounds the em dash, dubbed the 'ChatGPT hyphen'. Gen Z and social media users link it to AI content. However, literary figures like Jane Austen used it too. Its presence in AI stems from ...

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been giving this note to my editing clients: “Replace floating hyphen with proper em dash.” It comes up when I’m proofreading images, like PDFs, and I see a hyphen ...

Punctuation can be like spices in food. They flavor and enhance the dish, but too much can overwhelm the blend and ruin the meal. The em dash has always been like sumac: a great, complex flavor in its ...

Writing coach and CUNY Journalism Press editor Timothy Harper tells us how to properly use ellipses, em dashes, and parentheses. FULL TRANSCRIPT: The default, typically, when we’re using punctuation ...

The em dash (—) is a supremely useful (and fashionable) piece of punctuation used in writing and editing, often in place of a comma, colon, or parenthesis. While you might want to utilize it to make ...