I've always used dashes (sometimes autocorrected to the literal emdash character by the editor) and now it's a marker of [[AI Writing]], I noticed (circa 2026-04) that I've started consciously removing the dashes from my writing so as to not be accused of having AI writing. But actually, I'm going to go back to writing how I used to and not worry about the dashes - people should know my writing is not AI based on how dumb it is! Some examples of how I use it: I'm a big fan of semicolons but sometimes comments are semi-related but disjointed and still relate; my grammar is bad sometimes. > A simple unordered list of things we like to use - no ranking implied, just trying to keep it ordered. Sometimes I use it to offset a parenthetical or aside inline. > While we do have a few of those things - one example is the FooBar from a couple years ago - they don't always happen, and certainly aren't a hard and fast rule ## Hunting in my Obsidian Vault Hunting in my Obsidian vault, I was using dashes in my writing from day one when I switched in 2020. ``` # macOS grep -rEl --include='*.md' '\S +-+ +\S|\w--+\w|[—–]' /path/to/vault | \ while IFS= read -r f; do count=$(grep -cE '\S +-+ +\S|\w--+\w|[—–]' "$f") mtime=$(stat -f '%Sm' -t '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' "$f") printf '%s\t%4d\t%s\n' "$mtime" "$count" "$f" done | sort ```