Replace em dashes and en dashes in AI-written text with commas, hyphens or full stops — your choice.
Em dashes (—) have become a tell-tale sign of AI-written text, and many style guides prefer simpler punctuation. Paste your text to replace every em dash and en dash with the punctuation you choose, while keeping number ranges like 5–10 readable.
Runs entirely in your browser. Always read the result once — a dash sometimes needs a different punctuation mark than the one chosen.
Any text with em dashes (—), en dashes (–) or double hyphens (--).
Comma, spaced hyphen, full stop with automatic capitalisation, colon, semicolon, brackets for paired dashes, a space, or nothing.
Read it through once — some sentences read better with a different mark than the one chosen.
Counts em dashes, en dashes and double hyphens
Smart mode turns paired dashes into brackets
Keeps number ranges (5–10 → 5-10)
Runs in your browser — private and instant
Remove invisible characters and odd spaces that often come with AI-generated text.
| Mark | Name | Typical use | Unicode |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | Em dash | Breaks in a sentence — like this | U+2014 |
| – | En dash | Ranges: 2024–2026, pages 5–10 | U+2013 |
| - | Hyphen | Compound words: well-known | U+002D |
Also clean hidden characters with the AI text cleaner.
An em dash (—) is the width of a capital M and marks a break in a sentence. An en dash (–) is shorter and is used for ranges, such as 9–5 or pages 10–20. A hyphen (-) is shorter still and joins words.
Language models learn from large amounts of edited text, where em dashes are common, and tend to reuse them heavily. Many readers now notice this pattern, so editors often reduce them.
Usually a comma for a light pause, a colon before an explanation, brackets for an aside, or a full stop to split a long sentence. The smart mode guesses brackets for paired dashes and commas for single ones.
Windows: Alt+0151. Mac: Option+Shift+Hyphen. Many apps also convert two hyphens (--) automatically.