This is largely because most people are incapable of thinking critically and evaluating substance. So they regress to indirect markers of good writing, and the whole thing becomes a game of signaling.
The rot is so deep, many popular resources on writing focus more on style and presentation than focusing on the substance of writing. And even when best-intentioned, all this does is make poor writing a bit more palatable by giving it a veneer of polish.
Guides such as S&W focus entirely on style. Then we have the dearth of guides on composing a good sentence.
Of course, S&W is also filled with insanely stupid advice. "Don't split an infinitive" immediately comes to mind. Ask yourself which sounds more powerful, oh fellow geeks:
* To go boldly where no one has gone before
* To boldly go where no one has gone before
Split infinitive form is so much better. "Don't split an infinitive" is one more smooth-brained 19th century rule invented by Latin-obsessed weirdos who thought it was the perfect language, and that they should impose Romance grammar on Germanic languages. (See also "don't end a sentence with a preposition" and "don't start a sentence with a conjunction.")
I agree that post-COVID we have a glaring issue with the problem you highlight, but I don't think the focus on orthography is a symptom. Long ago, my dad criticized my résumé because I didn't put two sentences after periods despite me using a variable-spaced font. The man's nearly eighty. He's not exactly some 21st-century miseducation case.
One caveat I'll add at the end is that focusing on form isn't always bad. Form is one of the great joys of reading both poetry and prose. Word selection is often form rather than substance. The opening lines of Lolita are pure form. Nabokov could've easily just said "I'm a pedophile and Lolita is attractive to me." Instead, he chose words that have you overuse your tongue when you sub-vocalize, making the text feel uncomfortably erotic to a normal, non-pedo reader.
No, with AI it's because it's MUCH faster than evaluating substance, and fast ways to weed out AI slop are desparately needed, since it can be produced so quickly.
It's the thing it was trained to do. The entire decades-old architecture has exited for specifically that purpose. That second "L" in "LLM" is "language" for a reason.
We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English. I don't know what the best approach to take here is necessarily, but the more I see language evolving over time (especially over the past two decades) I think I'd prefer to shift my habits in line with whatever the "modern standard" is in order to avoid falling into pitfalls, i.e. being accused of being an AI writer.
The old school of writing it in digital documents. Typesetting predates and is not limited to digital documents.
To my knowledge (and what I meant by "old school"), it was common to type a "--" dash on typewriters[0] because most of them lacked en- and em-dashes, which are obviously not digital documentation devices.
But yes, typesetters of old (old, old school!) had myriad glyph blocks available to them for pressing!
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Typewriter_conventi...
The idea that a double-hyphen is "old school" is on par with the false notion that double-spacing between sentences is a product of the typewriter; one need only look at a typeset book from before the twentieth century to see the truth, or look at a decent image of the Declaration of Independence or other hand-written document from prior centuries to see the extra space left between sentences.
Many of the changes we see in written English style are the product of ignorance of the past beyond two generations or so. Avoiding em-dashes to keep up with the latest anti-AI fad is just reacting mindlessly to the stimulus of popular ignorance instead of deliberately situating one's style in the history of writing conventions.
Agreed that in terms of precedent, typesetters had moveable type dashes for their presses.
> the fifteenth century, and "em" and "en" were standard printing widths in moveable type. People who write CSS still recognize em as a width.
This is very interesting!
> We're experiencing broad scale changes in the sentiment of style in written English.
Lol no we're not. The only people who give a fuck about this em dash AI bullshit are losers on Tumblr and commenters on fanfiction sites who are obsessed with the idea that AI is the current Great Evil.
This is the orthographical equivalent of the New York Times running an article that soy-glazed avocado bouillon is the latest trend among Millennials because, like, one of the editors caught their college dropout son eating it one morning at the family table. Son said "duh dad everyone's doing it" to fuck with his dad, and next thing you know, a hundred think pieces on Mexican-Japanese breakfast being trendy.
I've never met an adult in my professional or personal life who actually gives a shit about this. We're talking a fraction of a percent of people who don't want you to use AI, and a fraction of that who waste their life trying to detect it.
Write the way you want. If people can read it, that's all that matters.
Apologies for the French. Blame Canada.
*Edit* Also the em dash is based. Using a double dash should be a prison sentence.
The combination of both I usually find in text generated for me by LLM, and so far, it serves as a good signal for density of information and, inversely, not-quite-right ideas and their connections. (That's not to say it's pervasive, but below the surface, the quality of LLM text as a medium is often not great.)
There may be well-written text of non-trivial length generated by LLMs, but so far I haven't knowingly encountered any, with or without em-dashes. Human editing remains very necessary.
If I post some information, then I have had people accusing me of cribbing it off Wikipedia. When I have translated from some languages, people assume I'm using Google. Even though in one case, the language in question wasn't even available on Google Translate. (I went and checked.)