The em-dash is like the AK-47: it feels good in one’s own hand, but one is distressed to find it everywhere one looks. If you find yourself wielding either often, you should stop and ask yourself: “Am I the bad guy?”

Just minutes ago I read two articles demonstrating the horror of a world awash in em-dashes, both in The New York Times [0, 1]. One may empathize with the writers, if one is so inclined: they have employed em-dashes for emphasis, to insert asides, and to lend needed structure to their sentences. But I think one should not be so sympathetic, because they’ve used 19 of the damn things (!), and every usage would arguably be improved by substituting another form of punctuation or by restructuring the sentence in a way that eliminates the need for complex punctuation entirely.

The ugliest em-dash is in the second sentence of the first article:

> A new class of security vulnerability — a variety of flaws that affect almost all major microprocessor chips, and that could enable hackers to steal information from personal computers as well as cloud computing services — was announced on Wednesday.

This is an abomination. The writer has needlessly separated the sentence’s subject and predicate by two em-dashes and 28 words in two phrases, burdening the reader with the task of untangling her mess. Did neither she nor her editor care enough about the reader to re-write the sentence trivially in a natural way? Try this:

A new class of security vulnerability was announced on Wednesday, a variety of flaws that affect almost all major microprocessor chips. The flaws could enable hackers to steal information from personal computers as well as cloud computing services.

This use of a double em-dash to insert additional information mid-sentence is almost always the wrong thing to do. Here’s another example from the second article:

> Over the next few years, hundreds of millions of dollars in American deposits flowed from Swiss banking stalwarts — institutions like Credit Suisse and Julius Baer — to Bank Frey.

I propose instead:

Over the next few years, hundreds of millions of dollars in American deposits flowed to Bank Frey from Swiss banking stalwarts like Credit Suisse and Julius Baer.

If you find yourself using em-dashes like this, pause and ask yourself why you can’t render the sentence more naturally. Most times you can, whether by restructuring the sentence, by using standard appositive phrases set off by commas, or by true parentheticals (preferably at the end of the sentence, not dividing the subject and predicate). If you can’t make that work, consider separating the information you wish to convey into two or more sentences.

Here are some more examples of what not to do. From the second article:

> And since the problem is built into the hardware — billions of chips that cannot easily be replaced — fixing this class of problems may also be prohibitively expensive.

Just replace “hardware” with the more detailed phrase and a comma: “... since the problem is built into billions of chips that cannot easily be replaced, fixing ...”

From the second article:

> She would return to the United States secretly carrying just under $10,000 in cash — the cutoff for having to make a customs declaration.

Just use a fucking comma!

Now, if you’ll give me a moment to collect myself in the face of all of this grammatical turpitude, I will say that there are two usages of the em-dash in these articles that I do think sensible. Both set off information in ways that other forms of punctuation can’t (except for the venerable parentheses), and they do so in ways that don’t interrupt the logical flow of the sentence:

> A common trick involves having the microprocessor predict what the program is about to do and start doing it before it has been asked to do it — say, fetching data from memory.

> Prosecutors said all the secrecy — the nameless debit cards, the scissored bank paperwork, the shadowy phone calls — showed Mr. Buck knew what he was doing was wrong.

TLDR: if you use em-dashes often, you might be a lazy writer with a bad editor.

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0. “The looming digital meltdown,” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/looming-digital-m...

1. “A Swiss banker helped Americans dodge taxes. Was it a crime?”, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/stefan-buck-tax-...