# Space-surrounded em dash Part of [The AI Tells Index](https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells). A tell signals low effort. It does not identify an author. Skilled writers produce every shape listed here, some of them daily, and automated detectors misread those writers for it at rates measured above 60 percent on non-native English prose. Nothing in this index proves that a machine wrote anything. Read an entry as one piece of evidence to weigh against the false-positive notes printed beside it. ## Facts - Id: space-surrounded-em-dash - Category: Formatting (formatting) - Subcategory: punctuation - Also known as: spaced em dash, word space dash space word - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: low - Evidence grade: community-observed (named by practitioners, no formal measurement exists) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/space-surrounded-em-dash ## Description 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-written 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. ## Detection Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written) Scope: document ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens. ```regex \S[ \u00A0]\u2014[ \u00A0]\S[\s\S]{0,400}?\S[ \u00A0]\u2014[ \u00A0]\S ``` Flags: g ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > 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. After, repaired: > 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. Note: 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. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. 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 - linkedin: 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. ## Sources 1. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 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. ## License CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Attribution: The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells Reuse the data, including commercially. Keep the attribution line. --- Dataset version 1.0.0. Schema version 1. Part of [FeedSquad](https://feedsquad.com). 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