Don’t Write Worse to Avoid Looking Like AI
A few weeks ago the internet decided curly quotation marks are a sign a robot wrote your book. Somebody posted a warning about it on Threads, screenshot and all, and the comments filled with writers promising to switch to straight quotes immediately.
First they came for the em dashes. Then the Oxford comma. Now curly quotes, which printers have been setting in fiction for centuries before anyone imagined a machine could write a sentence.
All three are conventions of craft. Dropping them doesn’t make you sound more human. It makes you sound like you type with your elbows.
The Oxford comma exists because lists go wrong without it. “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” Without the comma, you’ve announced that Ayn Rand and God are your parents. With it, you’ve thanked three parties, which was the plan.
Curly quotes are how books have always been printed. Straight quotes are a typewriter shortcut; the machine didn’t have room for a second pair. Your 1974 paperback has curly quotes on every page, and nobody suspected it of anything.
The em dash has exactly one job: the interruption. The thought that breaks in, the one a comma is too calm to carry and parentheses too cozy—there it is, doing its work. It’s also true the internet ruined it, and AI leaned on it hard. The fix is dosage. Keep the one that interrupts. Cut the five standing in for commas.
The detectors are guessing. They flag correct punctuation because the models punctuate correctly more often than tired humans do. Error reads as authenticity to them, which is a trade you should not make with your prose.
Write it the best way you know how. The one thing no detector can fake is the detail only you would know.
Open your manuscript. Find every em dash and ask whether a comma, colon, or period would do the job. Keep the survivors. Then put your Oxford commas back, and let your quotes curl.
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