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Human writers have always used the em dash

Human writers have always used the em dash. In fact, it’s the most human punctuation mark there is.

You recognize a vampire because it can't enter your house without an invitation; it would be handy, at a moment when language is suddenly being produced at enormous scale by unthinking machines, to have a similar rubric for text. Around a hundred years ago, though, writing instruction started to favor simple, direct sentences and pared-down grammatical structures in the interest of clarity and efficiency rather than complicated thought. Without all the shades and nuances of complex sentence forms, you encounter a sort of downward pressure to simplify your ideas—which, again, is often a good thing to do, but not always when you're trying to say something original about the multifarious and contradictory world in which you live.

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