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:

Tip

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. ↩︎