AI is transforming our tools, our writing, and — apparently now — our sense of typographic originality. But there are two quirks of my writing that now get me side-eye from friends:

  1. em and en dashes
  2. predominant lowercasing

I know, i know. nobody likes the guy who says he liked the band before they got famous. but here we are.

I was lowercasing and em-en dashing before AI and i’d like to claim this back please. my friends roll their eyes when i try. even the polite ones. so, since i can’t get a word in at dinner, i’ll do it here.

But first, receipts… #

I need to build some credibility before I attempt to explain myself. one of the advantages of writing this blog for some time now: I can do a quick git log -S1 and show you some early mention of these “quirks”:

The earliest post I have here using an em dash is from 2017.

a blog post from 2017 where i use an em dash 😎
blog post from 2017 where i use an em dash 😎. click for proof

might I remind you, ChatGPT was introduced to this world in 2022.

And now the more egregious one that Sam Altman is attempting to rob me of2:

git history of an old version of my blog 11 years ago showing my about page as saying i prefer using lowercase
from an old version of my blog from 11 years ago

Reclaiming my quirks #

em & en dashes #

listen folks, — & – are beautiful characters that the english language provides us. Strunk & White, who wrote a once seminal guide have this to say:

A dash is a mark of separation stonger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses…

we cannot let the AI overlords claim these characters theirs. I have a proposal:

Put spaces around your em and en dashes.

you see when AI genereates text, it tends to do the typographically standard thing—not pad the dash with spaces, like i just demonstrated. but if you did pad it with spaces — it becomes a stylistic choice, and adds visual rhythm to boot.

we can now use em and en dashes and prove that ChatGPT didn’t write this!

about the lowercasing #

I’ve mentioned my rsi before and even the crazy keyboard hacks to help me with it. one important one is mapping caps-lock to escape. if i have to capitalize my characters often, that’s my pinky painfully stretching to one of the ⇧ (shift) keys while typing the character with the other hand. no bueno for me.

i now implore you: let’s normalize not calling people typing in all lowercase as AI zealots proving their humanness.

yeah, i know this one is a stretch. but my fingers will click-clack their way through the shame.

  1. very cool git trick to search your history, by the way. yes, I was desperate to find the evidence. ↩︎

  2. The eagle eye will notice that I sometimes use proper punctuation. this is purely accidental or most likely my Mac auto-correcting my away. ↩︎