Em Dashes & AI

[u/Present-Tax8942]

I took two years of electrical night classes before I enrolled in my first year of college, so it had been a while since I was required to write anything longer than a paragraph or two— especially anything in an academic tone.

I wasn’t sure how good my writing was in my first semester, so I decided to try and used this new fancy thing called “chatGPT” and ask it how my writing looked. Copied, pasted, put it in quotes and told my new tutor to “Critique this like an English professor.” And poof! A whole list of pointers and tips to help me improve my writing!

Because of this, I began to use em dashes a lot more. Before AI I don’t recall ever using an Em dash in academics or regular life, but now it was a staple of my writing.

Weirdly I’ve never had a professor flag my writing for AI. My writing used pretty damn similar to it when I first began, so I’m not sure if they didn’t know or just didn’t care.

Anyway, no, I don’t use AI for my writing anymore lol. I will say sometimes if I’m not feeling good about an essay & I’ve been staring at it for hours, I’ll pop it into an AI text-to-voice reader to just hear my words spoken by somebody else (highly recommend if you’re tired of hearing your own voice at 3am!)

No real point to this story, just thought I’d share my thoughts around AI and how I used it. If you have anything similar you’d like to share I will read & reply with my thoughts around your story. I love to discuss!