Words, phrases, and punctuation patterns commonly associated with AI-generated text. Avoid these to ensure writing sounds natural and human.
Sources: Grammarly (2025), Microsoft 365 Life Hacks (2025), GPTHuman (2025), Walter Writes (2025), Textero (2025), Plagiarism Today (2025), Rolling Stone (2025), MDPI Blog (2025)
**The em dash (—) has become one of the most reliable markers of AI-generated content.**
Em dashes are longer than hyphens (-) and are used for emphasis, interruptions, or parenthetical information. While they have legitimate uses in writing, AI models drastically overuse them.
### Why Em Dashes Signal AI Writing
- AI models were trained on edited books, academic papers, and style guides where em dashes appear frequently
- AI uses em dashes as a shortcut for sentence variety instead of commas, colons, or parentheses
- Most human writers rarely use em dashes because they don't exist as a standard keyboard key
- The overuse is so consistent that it has become the unofficial signature of ChatGPT writing
### What To Do Instead
| Instead of | Use |
|------------|-----|
| The results—which were surprising—showed... | The results, which were surprising, showed... |
| This approach—unlike traditional methods—allows... | This approach, unlike traditional methods, allows... |
| The study found—as expected—that... | The study found, as expected, that... |
| Communication skills—both written and verbal—are essential | Communication skills (both written and verbal) are essential |
### Guidelines
- Use commas for most parenthetical information
- Use colons to introduce explanations or lists
- Use parentheses for supplementary information
- Reserve em dashes for rare, deliberate emphasis only
- If you find yourself using more than one em dash per page, revise
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## Overused Verbs
| Avoid | Use Instead |
|-------|-------------|
| delve (into) | explore, examine, investigate, look at |
