McCarthy isn’t an em dash guy himself—more of a “three words and a period” guy. His prose style resembles an Ernest Hemingway who has still killed himself but managed to keep writing.

Lastly, the em dash is the longest of the dashes and is commonly used in pairs to replace excess punctuation in a sentence and clean things up a bit. Norris’s example looks like this: ...

Grammar columnist and expert June Casagrande dives into why we use the em dash and the AI myths associated with it.