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I'm very curious how you guys are going to feel about this,

but I just decided I need to go on a... I guess a grammar rant, a writing rant.

Going on a grant?

A romance?

A romance? Let's talk about the double M dash. Oh, the sure fire sign of chat GPD? Yes. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? Okay, you don't know the double M dash. I don't know chat GPT. I've heard of it, but I've never used it. Just a double M dash as a grammar as a, as a, uh, a quotation from the two dashes in a mark. Yes, the punctuation mark. Of course. The two that it becomes one, right? It's like a slightly longer than a hyphen, uh, longer than a dash. Okay. So I first discovered this in college when I read Emily Dickinson, who uses it throughout her poetry, and at the time, it drove me crazy.

I was like, what is this thing?

Just put a colon or a

semicolon or comma. What are you doing? And then something turned in my brain through the course

of college. I became obsessed with it. I started using it and everything I write. And it

become, when you know how to use a double M dash,

for the last 45 years of my life, it's been my secret weapon.

It's like, it's the thing that most people don't put into their writing

that you could always separate,

and you never had to use parentheticals the way like other people use them.

You never had to use a stupid semicolon, which is like the worst thing in a sentence.

It was just elegant and perfect. And by the way, my double M dash style was different than the way AI uses it.

I spaced on either side. So I would do a space, double M dash space, then letters. That's the way it should be.

One of my favorite uses, James Joyce, never use quotation marks. I hate quotation marks. I just can't stand them. All the best books don't use quotation marks. James Joyce wouldn't use quotation marks. He would just double M-Dash, and then you'd have a line of dialogue after that. Brilliant. Just so elegant, so easy to read.

You have so much punctuation you hate. Yeah. I didn't realize you would say you're like, I'd semi-colons. Yeah, I can't stand it. You hate them. Exclamation point, exclamation point. Yeah. You know, when you spend your time writing, it's like this is what you, yes. So I, yes, I have passions about this.

And it's so ruined by AI right now.

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