Space-surrounded em dash
- Id
- space-surrounded-em-dash
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- low
- Detection
- deterministic
- Evidence grade
- community-observed
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-17
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
Em dashes set with a space on each side, repeatedly, in a surface whose house style closes them up. Wikipedia treats this as the better-specified form of the dash tell. Density is the unit here too, so one spaced dash is a typing choice.
Why it reads as machine-made
Most people who reach for the mark learned a house rule with it and apply that rule every time. Model output tends to space the mark whatever surface it lands on, which is why the habit shows up in plain-text fields where nothing enforced it. The signal lives in the mismatch between the spacing and the convention of the place, so a reviewer who cannot name the convention has nothing to measure against.
Specimens
We shipped the new importer late — later than any of us wanted — and nobody complained. Shipping late is something every team learns to live with — usually more than once — and it stops feeling like a crisis somewhere around the third time. The work landed, and landing is most of what anyone remembers a year later.
We shipped the new importer three months late, on 14 July, and nobody complained. The delay came down to the CSV parser, which we rewrote twice after it choked on the semicolon-delimited exports our largest account sends every Monday.
Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. The tell is the spacing around the mark, not the empty prose it sits in. The prose is empty so a reader is not left thinking the entry objects to a well-made sentence.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- \S[ \u00A0]\u2014[ \u00A0]\S[\s\S]{0,400}?\S[ \u00A0]\u2014[ \u00A0]\S
- Flags
- g
- Scope
- document
Who writes this way legitimately
Associated Press style spaces its dashes by house rule, and much British publishing sets a spaced en dash where American publishing closes up an em dash. Plenty of newsrooms and newsletter templates apply their own spacing on the way to the page, so the author never chose it. Anyone drafting in an editor that auto-spaces produces the artifact without a decision. A reviewer separates the two by finding the publication style sheet first and then checking whether the same writer spaced dashes before 2022. Consistent spacing across years is a house habit; spacing that appears only in recent drafts is worth a second look and nothing stronger.
Model attribution
Undocumented at family level. Wikipedia records the spacing habit without assigning it to a vendor, and no measurement of dash spacing by model exists in anything this project read.
Platform notes
- The composer stores plain text and applies no typographic conversion, so whatever spacing the writer pasted is what publishes.
- x
- Post bodies are plain text. Spacing survives to the timeline exactly as it was typed, which makes the surface a clean place to observe the habit and a poor place to judge anyone by it.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Active because it is the one dash check that survives the density argument. Wikipedia records that model dashes are usually surrounded by spaces, against the typographic guidance most human users of the mark already know. The pattern asks for two spaced dashes rather than one, so a single typing choice does not register. Regex verified on 2026-08-15 against its own specimen and against three negatives, one of them a spaced en dash in the British convention. |
Sources
- 01Wikipedia: Signs of AI writingcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells