A few weeks ago, back when ChatGPT 5.1 was released, one “Very Important AI Man” joked about the em dash and the ability to take it away from the model due to “overuse.”
Everyone laughed. My writer brain, who lives just north of terminally online, however, did not.
It heard, “Cool. So, we’ve built a machine that accidentally—and aptly, even with fangirl-level zeal—picked up on one of the few punctuation marks with a personality. And our first instinct is to, what, lobotomize it?”
That’s the whole problem.
We’ve moved beyond simply using AI to “speed up writing” and into using AI, grueling tone checks, and 17-person content committees to grind the spikiness off language until everything reads like it was written by the same, deeply anxious, people-pleasing toaster.
Come on, I’m a human writer. I’m also deeply anxious and people-pleasing!
In all seriousness, though, it’s at this point that I have to ask:
On the page, are you a hedgehog or a porcupine?
Because while both are textbook Spiky Bois, the two reflect very different writing careers.
Hedgehog Writing: Perfectly Safe, Perfectly Forgettable
Hedgehogs deal with threats by rolling into a ball and hoping the danger gets bored and goes away. (Side note: This does not work with an overflowing inbox. Those emails will find you, well or not.)
Corporate writing tends to follow a similar approach.
Hedgehog writing is the result of years of:
- “Can we soften this?”
- “Love this, but it’s making Linda’s eye twitch.”
- “Can we make it less, you know, negative?”
You, as the writer, eventually stop asking “Is this true?” and shift to “Will anyone yell at me for this?”
That’s how the world ends up with lines like:
We’re excited to leverage cutting-edge AI to drive meaningful, personalized experiences at scale.
You’ve read that sentence 400 times from 400 different logos. But can you remember any of them?
Hedgehog writing happens when:
- Someone feeds an AI model: “AI + CX blog.”
- The model does exactly what it’s trained to do—generate the average of everything it’s ever seen.
- An overworked writer takes that draft, makes a few tweaks, but has 37 other things on their list. If they have 10 minutes between meetings about meetings, they’ll add some teeth in a couple of places.
- A stakeholder removes those exact two lines because they “feel a bit strong,” replacing each with a synonym for “innovative.”
Congratulations, you’ve produced hedgehog writing. While it rolls through approvals like butter, it evaporates the second it hits your prospect’s brain.
Porcupine Writing: Fearless? Nah. Just Fears Less.
Porcupines are also small, nervous creatures. They just handle things differently. Rather than rolling into a ball, they take aim.
Porcupine writing shows up when you’re just as scared of being wrong or cringe or off brand as everyone else. But you care about being real, so you still try.
- Hedgehog: Our AI helps teams move faster and focus on what matters most!
- Porcupine: Our AI helps your team move faster—even when Kyle has no idea what actually matters.
Same product. Same feature. Different nervous system.
One side says, “Please don’t fire me.” The other says, “Please don’t waste your life, even if Kyle is.”
Most of us proudly start as porcupines. As kids, we wrote freely, wrote weirdly, wrote with oddly specific sentences and called things out in plain language. Then we had to join society and were hit with obligations like school, academic tone (and the apparently unbreachable safety net of the 5-paragraph essay), and an air of professionalism that feels like a hollow, ill-fitting suit and tie we scrambled to pick out last-minute at Goodwill so we at least look like we belong.
By the time AI gets thrown into the mix, we’ve already been praised so much for “sounding polished,” that we can’t tell the difference between a good sentence and one that just…is.
So, when the robots show up with a default of “bland competence,” we don’t resist. Nah, we sigh in deep relief and ship it. Because we can breathe again!
Only now, none of the work takes our breath away.
AI as a Hedgehog Accelerator
If hedgehog writing is the kind that rolls up and gets overlooked, AI turns the dial to Sonic levels. Here one moment, gone the next, without a whiff of recall.
Now don’t come at me. I’m not anti-AI. I write in cybersecurity—largely AI security—for a living. I’d be buried under a mountain of creative requests and half-finished drafts if I didn’t have some help.
The problems with AI happen when we let the models set our emotional temperature.
Large language models (LLMs) are pattern engines, trained to predict what someone like us would probably say next. If you ask an AI to “write a blog about how AI transforms the customer experience,” it’ll give you 84% statistically safe phrasing and 16% weirdness or noise.
I’m only human, so I totally made up those statistics, but the point still stands. What matters most is what you do with initial AI outputs. If you treat it like clay, great! Break it, sculpt it, inject it with your own neuroses to your heart’s content.
If you treat it as a finished masterpiece, you’re as overcooked as Clark Griswold’s holiday turkey. You go from, “Here’s what I actually think. Help me sharpen it.” To: “Here’s the brief. Now help me not think but also…not get in trouble.”
At that point, you’re not using AI to “quill-ify” your writing, but you are using it to outsource risk. And creativity. And real thought.
By design, AI systems happily accept the job.
The Em Dash and the Importance of Beautiful Friction
Now, about my beloved em dash.
Different punctuation marks have different agendas:
- Period: We’re done here.
- Comma: Let’s negotiate, bargain, or make a deal.
- Colon: I brought receipts: slides, research, and crippling self-doubt.
- Semicolon: I know how to connect two independent clauses; Oscar Wilde’s got nothing on me.
- Em dash: Hold up a minute—that’s not the whole truth. And I’m going to interrupt y—
The em dash is a multifunctional, stylistic jailbreak. It’s where a sentence stops being a good little soldier, defies orders, and barks out what’s actually on the writer’s mind. Yeah, sometimes it’s because a writer can’t just end the damn sentence, but more often than not, that writer added that dash with feeling.
The sheer versatility of the glyph is why humans use it all the time. That’s why AI models picked it up so readily. And guess what? The dash has been around a lot longer than AI.
But because LLMs latched onto our love of this horizontal middle finger to simple sentence constructions, stakeholders slash the em dash because it feels too AI, looks too informal, or makes sentences “messy.”
In other words, they tend to nix what makes prose come alive, leaving your voice on the cutting room floor. And really, the em dash debate is a microcosm for something much larger: the tech world’s ongoing battle against friction.
Modern culture worships smoothness. Fewer clicks. Faster loads. Blurring filters.
All great for online UX.
Death for persuasive and authentic human writing.
If I can glide through your content without pause, no “huh,” no eyebrow twitch, no huff-laugh through my nasal passages, then you haven’t persuaded me.
You’ve washed some words over my retinas.
Good writing builds beautiful friction: tiny, intentional jolts that make the reader stop, think, snort, or even on occasion, cringe.
The em dash is one of the simplest tools for it, and what do you know, it looks like someone jabbed a porcupine quill into the middle of a sentence.
- Hedgehog: Our platform helps you unlock new levels of productivity and growth.
- Porcupine: Our platform gets rid of the 13-spreadsheet workflow that Kyle has been using since 2018, so you can hit your deadlines—for once.
See? Specificity aside, you hit that dash and your brain stutters.
Purposeful latency, deliberate punch.
Bad friction is bad form. Beautiful friction gets a reaction like, “Hey, that line mildly roasted me, some dude named Kyle, and our outdated process. I trust this writer even more now.”
AI is phenomenal at destroying beautiful friction in the name of efficiency. You, alleged human writer, are responsible for preserving the good stuff. Even when you have to go 12 rounds with your friendly neighborhood review committee.
Corporate Sandpaper: Where Fully Quill-ified Writing Meets its Fate
It’d be cute—and oh-so easy—to blame the robots for everything, but they’re not the only culprits. Creative review processes are another.
Tell me if you’ve seen, or starred, in this movie before:
- Act 1: A writer turns in a spiky draft that says something real.
- Act 2: Meeting time rolls around. Comments fly: “This feels negative.” “‘Dumpster fire’ may not land with our audience.”
- Act 3: Specific metaphors die first, then honest asides. The line everyone secretly loved, but one person is nervous about, is the last to bleed out. Writer doubts every career choice that brought them to this moment.
What survives?
We’re excited to leverage cutting-edge AI to empower organizations on their journey.
What are we empowering? What journey? One does not simply prompt their way into Mordor!
Okay, okay. There’s nothing technically wrong with the sentence. Nothing risky. There’s also no pulse.
Layer AI into that same process and you simply speed up the spiral. Start generic, sand for bland—I mean brand—and publish for nobody.
As a result, you’re missing out on differentiation. Not because your feature set is similar to your top competitor’s but because you both used the same model and safe approach and now you sound like you were ghostwritten by the same apologetic, not-so-smart fridge.
Cryo-Sleep For Your Darling Quills
Let’s clear something up: I’m not telling you to fall on your sword for every sharp line. Sometimes Legal is right, your joke veers too edgelord, or there’s a better fit.
The real porcupine move is to never erase something without an extraction plan. Every time you’re hovering over the Delete key when you love something, send it to a cryo chamber instead.
Half the time, that line you adore that’s “too much” is just wrong for that venue.
Having a repository like this also teaches your nervous system that the stakes aren’t really life or death, even though the sting of rejection can feel that way. This approach lets you still write the real thing. Worst case, it just belongs in another timeline.
Try it. You’ll be amazed how much braver your next draft gets.
How to Use AI Without Letting it Domesticate You
You don’t need to burn your existing models or write rodent-based manifestos by candlelight. But you can’t hand AI full control over your writerly nervous system, either.
Trust me. I’ve been there, done that, bought the existential crises. (Just kidding, those came free in a box of Froot Loops.)
But I found myself again on the other side. I just had to be intentional about my processes.
Try these on for size:
Write something you know is too honest.
A whole rant, paragraph, or even a single line before you touch AI. Write it like you’re texting a colleague you trust. Use that line as your north star as you work with AI. If its output doesn’t measure up, you’re not done.
Use AI as a sparring partner, not a stunt double.
Ask it things like:
- Pitch me 5 brutally honest ways to say this to [target audience].
- What’s the most absurd metaphor for [x]?
- What am I missing here that [target audience] would flay me for?
Then, put on your boxing gloves and fight it. Get messy. Get mad. Go all caps. Truly, it’s okay to show some passion. You’ll enjoy it more, I promise.
Run a Spike Check.
Before review time, ask what lines will make stakeholders squint, bristle, or run away. Let’s not aim for that last one. But if you can’t point to a line that toes the contentious divide, your porcupine self never escaped her burrow. Sometimes—a lot of times—you’ll get told no. That’s okay. But don’t just curl up before you’ve even pressed Send. Make someone earn the right to dis-quill-ify your work before you self-reject your bravest ideas.
Audit your em dashes like fault lines.
Make one edit pass only about punctuation. Ask yourself what each em dash is doing. Test the sentences in different ways. If it feels like fluff, slash the dash. But if it’s a place where your rhythm and voice come out to play, keep it. And maybe build around it.
Am I just being precious about words and punctuation?
Maybe you don’t care about voice, and you just want your startup funded, product used, or blog read.
All this still matters.
Readers are drowning in AI slop troughs brimming with bland paste. Everyone’s using the same tools to talk about the same topics using the same LinkedInfluencer vocabulary. While people can’t always tell why something feels generic, they can still feel that it is.
Even a single, precisely prickly moment can make all the difference.
It’s a pattern interrupt. A well-timed quill that signals someone was awake behind that keyboard. That, in turn, builds a trust anchor, a connection point, and your voice is your unfair advantage.
But only if you let it be.
You can absolutely use AI, but if you don’t occasionally stand up for spiky, memorable, and unconventional language, you’ll be compared on price and specs alone.
No one wants that.
Your own sanity as a writer is also at stake. If you’re a porcupine forced to pretend you’re a hedgehog day in, day out, you’re going to hate writing.
Even if it’s your passion. Even if it’s the thing that makes you you.
Keeping a few visible quills—and a few em dashes, too—is an act of self-preservation, not an indulgence.
So, don’t get fired for a joke. But do stop rolling into a preemptive ball.
Next time, before you hit publish, run a quick scan:
- Does this sound like a human or a sentient toaster?
- Is there one moment of beautiful friction—a quill to the face that may sting a little but stick a lot?
- Have we said something others in our category can’t or won’t say?
If not, another prompt won’t save you. A spine might, though. (I say this with love, as someone who’s in this same spot daily.)
Be the porcupine in a pile of plush hedgehogs, the em dash in a paragraph of cowardly commas, and the line that makes some tired employee snort coffee and think, “OMG. She gets me.”
You can’t control the models. You probably can’t control your stakeholders. But the sharpest sentence in your next draft?
You know what to do.