My daughter in Canada, who works as an online editor, tells me her writers are being urged not to use dashes, as that punctuation mark is too heavily associated with AI-generated content. It seems the likes of ChatGPT are strangely fond of scattering dashes through their 'writing' – with the result that it now looks more authentically human to eschew them. This is a sorry state of affairs – the beginning of the end for the dash? – especially as my daughter is as fond of dashes as I am. 'Now', says one of her writers, 'we're stuck with commas, semicolons, and existential dread.' What's worse, the semicolon could be next, according to some reports – and then what will we do?
The versatile and endlessly useful dash – introducing light and space into airless prose – is an invaluable weapon in the writer's armoury. It is impossible to imagine some writer's works – notably Laurence Sterne's – without the dash, of which he was the supreme virtuoso. How would Keats's letters read without their spattering of dashes? As it happens, we have an enlightening example of what happens when dashes (along with underlinings, abbreviations and exclamation marks) are edited out of manuscript text in favour of decorous semicolons, full stops and quotation marks. This was the treatment meted out to Jane Austen by her publishers, and it seems to me that it drained her writing of a good deal of its original vitality. Here is a passage from the manuscript of Persuasion, as written –
You should have distinguished – replied Anne – You should not have suspected me now; – The case so different, & my age so different! – If I was wrong, in yeilding to Persuasion once, remember that it was to Persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of Risk. When I yeilded, I thought it was to Duty – But no Duty could be called in aid here. – In marrying a Man indifferent to me, all Risk would have been incurred, & all Duty violated.
And here is the tidied-up version –
'You should have distinguished,' replied Anne. 'You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different. If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated.'
Compare and contrast, as they say.
At present it is only possible to read Jane Austen in the original in the prohibitively expensive five-volume set of Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts, edited by Kathryn Sutherland. Surely there is enough interest in Austen to publish some of them in an affordable form.