55. AI 'Tells' In Copy And How To Fix Them

But the first one, let's just get it out of the way, is talking about the en dash.

The en dash is such a fun piece of punctuation.

I freaking love the en dash.

I've been using the en dash for years.

And honestly, after AI hit the mainstream as a language learning model, so ChatGPT about three, four years ago, I had to look up like what is an en dash? Because I was using it.

Turns out I was also using it slightly incorrectly as far as how I was using spacing around it, but I also learned that I was using the en dash rather than the em dash typically.

So should we be using en dashes? Yeah, you can pry the en dash out of my cold, dead hand.

However, AI tends to overuse it.

So what can you do instead? Oftentimes there's a couple things that happen with the en dash.

Is either one, it could be totally replaced by a comma and still be grammatically correct and flow way better.

The en dash implies a heavy pause.

It implies that there's a sentence within a sentence or an idea within a sentence that needs to be sussed out independently.

And if we just replace an en dash with a couple of commas, so like if an en dash bookends two parts of a sentence, we could just get rid of the en dashes, put commas there, and then rather than it being this heavy pause or this intense pause, it just makes the copy flow better.

Another thing that AI does with the en dash is whatever comes after the dash tends to be a contradiction to the rest of the sentence.

So for example, we might see it in your copy above the fold and it'll say something like, "Run your business smarter," en dash, "without the overwhelm." And it's like, man, you weren't thinking about overwhelm before, but now you are because it just sent you on this emotional rollercoaster with a completely new idea in the same sentence.

So rather than just getting rid of the en dash, we could just get rid of the contradictory part of the sentence so that on its own, get your life together without the overwhelm, so that just get your life together is a powerful, succinct statement.

So that's one thing.

That's thing number one, the en dash.

Okay, now that's out of the way.

We can talk about all the other AI tells that aren't the en dash.