The em dash test: does your copy sound like a person?

We rewrote this site's copy recently, and one edit mattered more than any headline: we removed every em dash.

Not because em dashes are wrong. Because right now, in 2026, a page full of them reads as machine-written. AI models lean on that punctuation hard, and readers have learned the pattern even if they couldn't name it. The writing feels assembled instead of said.

The test

Read your copy out loud. Every place you pause and think "I would never say it like that," you've found a tell. Common ones:

• Em dashes doing the work a comma or a period should do
• Triplets everywhere: "fast, reliable, and scalable"
• Words nobody says out loud: "leverage," "seamless," "robust"
• Sentences that explain the point instead of making it

What we did instead

Commas, colons, and shorter sentences. If a line needed an em dash to hold together, the line was too long. Splitting it always read better.

The deeper lesson: if you use AI to help write (we do, daily), the machine drafts and a person decides. Our rule is simple. The AI is better at structure and grammar. The human is better at sounding like a human. Both do their job, neither does the other's.

Your customers can't always articulate why copy feels off. But they feel it, and trust follows the feeling. Read it out loud. Cut what you would never say.