Low diatribe

I came of age when punctuation mattered. Teachers circled commas in red. Editors debated serial oxford usage like philosophers. A well-placed em dash wasn't a flourish — it was a gesture of rhythm. It let a sentence breathe, let a thought take a human pause.

To this day I still text in full paragraphs, with punctuation. It makes my kids smirk. Recently a friend and mentor warned me that there was a growing perception of em dash usage being a red flag for AI generated content. So I stopped using them. I agonizingly reframed thoughts to avoid what would otherwise flow naturally.

The irony isn't lost on me.

AI learned its tone from us — fed on centuries of properly structured and punctuated prose. From writers who cared enough about clarity to give each idea a little air. Machines studied that cadence until they could mimic it. Now, to sound human, I'm supposed to avoid the very precision that made us human in the first place.

Something about that seems backwards.

The em dash used to mean intention. It said, "I'm still thinking this through, stay with me." It was punctuation as empathy. A bridge between breath and clarity.

But clarity has fallen out of fashion. We've mistaken looseness for authenticity, and brokenness for voice. In the rush to sound "natural," we flatten what made human writing musical in the first place: the rhythm, the pacing — the respect for pause.

When every sentence is a sprint to the next emoji, there's no room for reflection. No space to let the meaning catch up with the words.

The em dash, for me, is rebellion. A pause that refuses to be rushed. I see this same pattern beyond writing. In teams. In culture. In leadership.

We've optimized our communication to the point of compression. Slack threads instead of dialogue. Bullet points instead of nuance. Every message trimmed for speed — clarity lost in the cut. We're told attention spans have shrunk, but maybe what's really shrunk is our tolerance for stillness.

That's what punctuation once gave us: micro-moments of stillness. A breath before the next idea. A signal that said, this matters — linger here for a second.

Without that rhythm, language becomes static. So does leadership.

When I write with an em dash, I'm not trying to sound formal — I'm trying to sound deliberate. When I lead with one — metaphorically — I'm doing the same thing.

I see the em dash as the space between reaction and response. It's the pause that separates correction from understanding, urgency from clarity. It's what lets the next sentence land with intention instead of noise.

Quiet leaders use punctuation, even if they never call it that. They pause before replying. They hold silence long enough for others to speak. They let an idea finish unfolding before adding their own.

That pause — that dash — is where trust grows. Where signal threads through static. Where the conversation becomes more than exchange. I've started noticing how punctuation shows up in culture. Periods are certainty — final, absolute, clean. Exclamation points are performance — loud, affirming, short-lived. Ellipses are mystery — suspenseful... cheeky... contemplative... dramatic... But the em dash? It's invitation. It says, come with me for a moment — the thought isn't done.

That's what real dialogue feels like. That's what leadership should feel like.

It's tempting to think brevity equals wisdom — that the best leaders, like the best writers, say less. But the truth is subtler. The best ones pace themselves. They give shape to the silence. They punctuate with care.

I don't think the world needs more words. It needs better rhythm.

There's another irony here: we trained machines on our most careful writing, and they learned to echo it flawlessly. So now we flee from the very precision that taught them to sound human. We drop punctuation to prove we're real.

We've built a strange loop: authenticity through imperfection, imperfection through imitation, imitation through data scraped from perfection. If that sounds confusing — that's because it is.

And now the next generation of AI is training on this deliberately broken communication — learning that fragments equal authenticity, that typos signal urgency, that confusion demonstrates humanity. We're creating systems that will learn to mimic our performance of casualness, then we'll need to find new ways to prove we're not them.

The loop keeps tightening. Somewhere along the way, we decided that caring about how we communicate became incompatible with caring about what we communicate. Grammar became gatekeeping. Punctuation became pretension. The typo became proof of urgency, the fragment evidence of passion. We started performing casualness as its own kind of authenticity.

But there's something hollow about deliberately breaking grammar to seem real. It's become its own code, its own performance. The fear seems to be that if we communicate too clearly, too precisely, we'll be seen as cold or calculating, artificial. So we choose confusion over connection, mistaking rushed communication for genuine emotion.

Maybe the way out isn't to abandon structure, but to remember why we built it in the first place. Structure wasn't control — it was care. The sentence, like a bridge, holds because someone took time to balance weight and distance. Remove that care, and the bridge still stands — until it doesn't.

The em dash doesn't make writing robotic. It makes it attentive. And attention feels like the most human thing we have left. So I've decided to reclaim it, and I'll keep using it. Not because it's proper, but because it reminds me to pause — to respect the reader, the rhythm, the moment. To let the next thought arrive instead of chasing it.

I have spent my life constantly attempting to clarify meaning, to be as specific as possible when translating internal thought into external communication. Punctuation can be viewed as a way of practicing mindfulness when that effort is applied to writing — the conscious choice to pause, to breathe, to let the reader follow your thinking in their own way.

I believe leadership could learn from it. In a world that rewards reaction, the quiet act of pausing — even briefly — becomes radical.

When everyone is trying to sound spontaneous, I'll take deliberate. When everyone is typing faster, I'll slow down. When everyone rushes to hit send, I'll wait for the em dash — and whatever clarity comes after.

This reflection is dedicated to my ride or die padawan, who suggested a disclaimer of this sort for the site. Why disclaim when you can resonate?