How to remove em dashes from AI text without rewriting it

ChatGPT seasons nearly everything with the em dash (—, U+2014): asides, pauses, punchlines, whole paragraph rhythms. One or two are a style choice. Forty is a tell, and most house styles cap them far below what a model emits. You do not need to rewrite the draft to fix this. The dashes are characters, and characters can be replaced mechanically.

Which dashes to target

Three characters get confused here, and only two are usually the problem. The hyphen-minus (-, U+002D) is the plain ASCII one your keyboard types. Leave it alone. The en dash (–, U+2013) is the range marker in 1914–1918 and the joint in Bose–Einstein. In most drafts it is correct where it stands. The em dash (—, U+2014) is the interrupter: the plan — which nobody read — failed. That is the one AI text overuses, and the one to normalize.

What to replace them with

An em dash doing a hyphen's job becomes a hyphen: line-initial list markers, compound words the model dressed up. An em dash doing a comma's or colon's job becomes that mark: if you can lift the aside out and the sentence still parses, a comma or colon usually fits the slot. An em dash doing a full stop's job, the dramatic pause before a punchline, becomes a full stop. When none of those fit, a spaced hyphen (-) keeps the interruption without the AI sheen. Numeric ranges and joint names keep their en dash; those were never the problem.

The one-pass way

Paste the draft into the cleaner on the text cleaner page. Long dashes are covered by default, and the resolution is context-sensitive: 1914–1918 collapses to a tight hyphen, Bose–Einstein keeps its joint, and a true interrupter becomes a spaced hyphen. Review the highlights, copy the clean version back, then do a find for any remaining — and judge those by hand. There should be few enough left to read individually, which is the entire point: the pass turns forty judgment calls into three.

The manual way, in Word or Docs

If you prefer to stay in the editor, find-and-replace handles it. Search for — and step through the matches rather than replacing all: the ten percent that are doing real work deserve to survive. In Word, ^w matches whitespace around the dash when you want the spaced-hyphen form in one step; in Docs, two passes (dash with spaces, then dash without) cover the same ground. Watch for the double hyphen -- the model sometimes emits instead: same treatment.

If your paste also breaks code or JSON, the dashes are only half the story. Read why curly quotes and long dashes break code and JSON next.