once upon a time we used punctuation to make sentences clearer 
we dropped it because it was too much of a hassle while typing 
then smartphones started to add it for you 
now we intentionally avoid it to sound more natural 

a full cycle 

im a linguist – a descriptivist at heart – i wont tell you what to do or how to write 
but for the love of god – is this the first time you’ve seen a dash 

is lowercase a e s t h e t i c 
or survival 

be careful – capital letters might make you look like youre pitching something 
a semicolon – very sus 
an enumeration – chatgpt 100% 

a new human voice – stripped of the form
in the name of authenticity 

you check wikipedias signs of ai writing – and it looks suspiciously like the handouts from the first-year writing class 

avoid repetition 
dont start every sentence the same way 
use synonyms instead of really and very 

back then – it was meant to make your writing better 
now its evidence you might be a bot 

and you are stuck wondering what a normal person would say – because you are very not normal 

when chatgpt writing got popular i hoped that proper dashes – not - – would become more popular 
now i have to delete every dash from my writing 

it sounds great but all these dashes make me think chatgpt wrote this 

if you cant tell – does it matter 

but yes – i copy-pasted every dash in here – still dont know the shortcut – you might be onto something

once upon a time we used punctuation to make sentences clearer 
we dropped it because it was too much of a hassle while typing 
then smartphones started to add it for you 
now we intentionally avoid it to sound more natural 

a full cycle 

im a linguist – a descriptivist at heart – i wont tell you what to do or how to write 
but for the love of god – is this the first time you’ve seen a dash 

is lowercase a e s t h e t i c 
or survival 

be careful – capital letters might make you look like youre pitching something 
a semicolon – very sus 
an enumeration – chatgpt 100% 

a new human voice – stripped of the form
in the name of authenticity 

you check wikipedias signs of ai writing – and it looks suspiciously like the handouts from the first-year writing class 

avoid repetition 
dont start every sentence the same way 
use synonyms instead of really and very 

back then – it was meant to make your writing better 
now its evidence you might be a bot 

and you are stuck wondering what a normal person would say – because you are very not normal 

when chatgpt writing got popular i hoped that proper dashes – not - – would become more popular 
now i have to delete every dash from my writing 

it sounds great but all these dashes make me think chatgpt wrote this 

if you cant tell – does it matter 

but yes – i copy-pasted every dash in here – still dont know the shortcut – you might be onto something