In Honor of Punctuation Day

When I was in grad school for the final time, one of my professors removed all the semicolons from the first paper I submitted to her. In high dudgeon, I fired up the word processor and changed them all to periods—not because I agreed with her, but because she had all the power. 

Since this incident still bothers me, I was all set to write a pointedly sarcastic piece about how and when to use a semicolon in honor of National Punctuation Day. But then I came across this article: “With the Em Dash, A.I. Embraces a Fading Tradition” in the New York Times Magazine.

The subtitle reads “The debate about ChatGPT’s use of the em dash signifies a shift in not only how we write, but what writing is for.” The points that Nitsuh Abebe makes here are much more pressing than my professor’s rejection of the semicolon. To encourage you to read this piece—it’s short—here are a few quotations:

There are countless signals you might look for to determine whether a piece of writing was generated by A.I., but earlier this year the world seemed to fixate on one in particular: the em dash. ChatGPT was using it constantly — like so, and even if you begged it not to.

• “The dash is a time-honored and exceedingly normal tool for constructing sentences!”
• “Humans do not think or speak in sentences; we think and speak in thoughts, which interrupt and introduce and complicate one another in a neat little dance that creates larger, more complex ideas. . . . This is the whole thing punctuation is for.”
• “Oceans of communication that used to be handled by speech are now left to lone individuals typing into the internet.”

If you’ll read this article, I’ll save my semicolon harangue for next year; fortunately, National Punctuation Day is an annual event!

Reference Note 

Only 13% Of Americans Know How To Use Punctuation Correctly — So If You Can’t Pass This 17-Question Grammar Test, You Might Be One Of The Dumb Ones

© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown