I am Not a Robot
I am going to keep my triads and my em dashes
I often think about an old bit by comedian John Mulaney in which he laments that we spend time trying to convince robots that we are not robots. The joke predates ChatGPT by several years. Mulaney was mostly complaining about the CAPTCHA system intended to block bots. You can watch it here:
Many writers, particularly younger writers who have not had the time to build credibility, will now be under pressure to prove that their work is human authored. I have had many years to win the trust of readers, and I have credentials that help: a doctorate in literature, a lot of work published before the advent of LLMs, an editing job at Johns Hopkins. Still, I have started adding a note to pitch emails saying that I do not use LLMs to write.
AI has caused some writers to reconsider certain stylistic habits. In a recent New Yorker article, Vauhini Vara writes that she “vowed to stop using the em dash” because of AI. Her resolution, however, lasted only twelve words into her draft and then she quickly re-embraced that beloved punctuation mark. She writes, “[t]he thinking part of my mind had decided to reject the em dash, but some other, more primal part of me refused.” Vara gives an interesting brief history of the em dash and notes that the punctuation appears at least two dozen times in the first chapter of Moby Dick.
Like Vara, I have started to question some of my habits because I want to make sure I sound human. I am not willing to drop my em dashes (Vara quotes Lili Anolik: “Asking a writer to give up the em dash is like asking a carpenter to give up the screwdriver”). I have, however, started to be wary of triads, strings of three words or phrases.
Three is an elegant number. It’s a useful number to provide evidence without lists becoming unwieldy. I used the triad structure in the preceding paragraph when listing my credentials (doctorate, publications, editing job). I could have said more in that phrase: doctorate, publications, editing job, years of teaching writing, research grants. But all those phrases weigh down the prose. Two examples is not quite convincing. Two could be a coincidence; three seems like evidence.
There are three (!) triads in this short text by Gary Provost, recently posted by Junot Díaz:
Em dashes and triads are great! AI uses them for good reason. My colleague Bécquer Seguín points this out in this excellent article just published in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. Noting the recent wave of cancelled writers (Mia Ballard, Jamir Nazir, and Alex Preston), Seguín warns that accusing writers of using AI is the newest frontier of cancel culture. He does not condone AI use in writing (and I am absolutely certain he does not ever use it to write). However, he does observe that “if a witch hunt reflects the society that permits it, AI does so doubly because every phrase that indicates AI use comes from us” (my translation from Spanish). He observes that AI uses em dashes and triads because those structures are often marks of good writing.
This is not to say that AI produces good writing—it does not (did you notice that the opening sentence of this paragraph has two elements typical of AI-generated writing? Do I still sound human?). AI produces weak, cobbled-together texts (or, if you want a triad: unimaginative, repetitive, structurally unsound). Seguín’s point is that we should not abandon certain writing habits just to avoid sounding like machines. In the closing paragraphs of his article for El Mundo, Seguín draws on work by Leif Weatherby to criticize the tendency to define human-authored work negatively, that is, in contrast to technology. Human authorship, Seguín argues, must be defined in a more substantial way and not just as antithetical to AI.
So maybe I should keep my triads, even at the risk of Pangram flagging my work as AI generated (it’s not!)* After all, as Vara writes, language is “free; it belongs to all of us equally.” We should not let machines dictate what counts as human authorship.
*I have, probably like many writers, run my own work through Pangram. Always human generated, despite my em dashes and my triads.
Team Em Dash here!! (and Team Triads, and Team Oxford Comma...)
In comedy where would we be without "the rule of three"? Good article!