Plain Prose

The em dash is a fine piece of punctuation. Used once in a while, it sets off a sharp aside or a sudden turn. The problem is not the mark itself but the reflex: reaching for it two or three times a sentence, stacking clauses on it because it is easier than deciding where a sentence should actually break.

That habit is one of the clearest tells of machine-written prose. A human editor reads a paragraph with four em dashes in it and hears a writer who never committed to a structure. The dashes are load-bearing; remove them and the sentence collapses.

The fix is almost never a different dash. It is a decision. Where the draft says

We shipped the flow last week — and the numbers are already moving — activation is up.

you decide what the real sentences are:

We shipped the flow last week, and the numbers are already moving. Activation is up.

A comma, a period, or a rewritten clause will carry the same meaning without the telltale rhythm. When you rewrite something into plain prose, treat every em dash as a question: what were you avoiding by putting it here? Answer that question and the dash usually disappears on its own.

The same goes for the typed stand-in -- . It reads as a dash the writer could not be bothered to set properly. Restructure instead.

There is a sentence shape that shows up everywhere in machine-written marketing copy:

It's not just a drink, it's a ritual. It's not about the caffeine, it's about the pause. We're not selling beans, we're selling a moment.

The pattern is always the same. Deny the plain thing, then assert a grander thing in its place. It feels profound because it borrows the rhythm of real rhetorical antithesis, but it says almost nothing. The reader learns that your coffee is somehow more than coffee, without learning what it tastes like, what it costs, or why they should care.

Used once, deliberately, the shape can land. Used as a default, it is filler that signals the writer had no specific claim to make and reached for a template instead.

The cure is to make the actual claim. Instead of "it's not about the caffeine, it's about the pause," say what the pause is:

Our coffee is a morning ritual. The pause matters as much as the caffeine.

Now there is a concrete idea on the page. When you catch yourself writing "not X, but Y," or "it's not just X, it's Y," stop and ask what Y actually is. Write that down directly. The denial of X was never doing any work.

When someone asks a direct question, the answer should start with the answer. Machine writing tends to warm up first:

Certainly! Great question. I'd be happy to help you with that.

None of that is information. It is throat-clearing that pushes the real content down the page and makes the reader work to find it. A person answering a colleague does not say "certainly, I'd be happy to" before telling them how to roll back a deployment. They say how to roll back the deployment.

The matching tic is the closing reassurance:

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

It adds nothing and it slightly undercuts the answer, as if the writer is not sure it was any good. Strong writing ends when the point is made.

So when the task is to answer a question, open on the substance. If the answer is "run the rollback command against the last good release," that is your first sentence. Cut the pleasantries at both ends. The reader asked a question because they wanted an answer, not a greeting.