The Moment It Happened
You spent three days researching an industry analysis piece. You conducted interviews, structured the outline, and used an AI assistant only to brainstorm a transition between two sections.
When your editor reviewed the draft, their first comment wasn't about your data or your thesis. It was a note in the margin circling four em dashes in the opening paragraphs: "Did you write this with ChatGPT?"
Suddenly, instead of discussing your insights, you were spending thirty minutes defending your integrity and explaining your writing workflow.
The Hidden Root Cause: AI's Em Dash Addiction
Large language models are statistically trained on corpora where balanced, parenthetical clauses are heavily punctuated with Unicode em dashes (U+2014 —). While a human writer might use one em dash every two or three pages, AI writing models frequently insert two or three per paragraph.
When pasted into publishing systems, these distinctive dashes immediately signal AI assistance to experienced editors, hiring managers, and grading rubrics.
How to Prevent It with Text Cleaner
Before submitting any draft or publishing to a CMS, paste your text into Text Cleaner. The Clean pasted text and Remove Em Dash tools automatically convert all em dashes (—), en dashes (–), and horizontal bars into standard hyphens (-) in a single click, normalizing your typography without altering a single word of your arguments.
