Anonymous #1 10w

Yes, I love semicolons, though I never use em dashes. I believe my grammar is pretty good, which should be common practice for writing, so I wonder if intentionally using poor grammar is the fix. I’m not sure how that wouldn’t degrade the quality of the writing, though.

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Anonymous OP 10w

yeah I understand. I hate having to dumb down my work to pass the AI checks for university. But honestly the semi colon isn’t really necessary and is definitely I red flag. I think eliminating those alone will help a lot

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Anonymous #1 10w

Lmao I have thousands of them across my books (I wrote an eight part saga)

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Anonymous OP 10w

I am on the editorial team for a decently sized magazine and the way we think about it has very little to do with the grammatical structure—almost all good pieces of writing have a complex and specific grammatical voice! Punctuation-wise, it is all about what it is doing with it and why.

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Anonymous #2 10w

Basically don’t delete your saga or dumb yourself down, is what I’m saying.

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Anonymous #3 9w

Helpful

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Anonymous #2 9w

Wow could you tell me a little more about this? It sounds interesting

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Anonymous OP 9w

I am a huge syntax nerd and will not try to go on a crazy diatribe here but could go on for days! I attached the beginning of the opening sentence of the novella Agapē Agape (which is considered [mostly] good). This book creates its own grammar rules by throwing the reader straight in. They are forced to realize that a comma here functions as a full-ish stop. This is a kind of writing AI would never think of. When I am reading I always ask myself what is the internal logic for an em dash…

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Anonymous OP 9w

…and obviously it won’t be as extreme, usually. An AI model is predictive but will draw on all kinds of usages. Is the author using a semicolon to chain thoughts with the same subject? To make full-sentence lists? The balance is such a crucial part of it, because an AI model will almost always use it to balance (not this; this) (this; this) because it can’t think ahead.

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Anonymous #2 9w

Oh that’s so interesting! My characters use ellipses a lot, and it’s usually the reader’s task to figure out why the character is hesitating for this specific sentence. I don’t used semicolons in dialogue, though, and I don’t use ellipses in narration

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Anonymous OP 9w

Since I don’t use em dashes or parentheses, I often reassign their function to conjunctions or semicolons. Interestingly, the person who accused me of using AI acknowledged that my dialogue was 100% not AI written, but that they believed the narration was, because that makes sense somehow💀

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Anonymous OP 9w

Oh…they may just not know what they’re talking about, then. Also, you should definitely consider the em dash! They are clean and very beautifully functional. We read stories at editorial with em dashes all the time (almost 50%, if I had to guess) and rarely ask if it is AI.

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Anonymous #2 9w

I do see them in works written frequently; I know JK Rowling uses them a lot, and I don’t really have a problem with them per se, I just simply never have used them

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