The Last Post: Adventures with the Written Word

Punctuation has been around a long time, but it's still causing controversy in the digital age.  The Greek scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium invented the first formal system of punctuation in around  200 BCE .  In 2025, em dashes are often considered a sign of AI usage. But do you know the differences between hyphens and dashes, and when to use them? Hyphen, en dash, em dash: James Hutchinson Hyphens A hyphen (-) is a symbol used to join two (or more) separate words together. Hyphenation indicates a combined meaning, and adds important clarity to otherwise ambiguous phrases. When two adjectives are joined together to modify the same noun, this is known as a compound adjective . Example:   Humans are carbon-based lifeforms. En Dashes An en dash ( – ) is a symbol principally used to indicate a range between two figures.  However, it can also be used to separate two related parts of a sentence, with a single space appearing on either side.  It is the same le...

AI is now part of our everyday lives, from our homes to our workplaces, and even our healthcare facilities. But how useful and reliable are AI outputs for writers and editors? To quote author Debbie Emmitt , why is ‘ …the value of human editors... at risk of getting lost in the noise ’? And how can human intelligence enhance the technology? Illustration: James Hutchinson + AI How Does AI Work? According to Google's AI Overview, ' AI works by using computer systems to simulate human-like cognitive functions '. According to IBM , however, that's rather misleading. The article What is an AI model?  states that ' ...an AI model is defined by its ability to autonomously make decisions or predictions, rather than simulate human intelligence ’. AI models make predictions based on algorithms. The large language models (LLMs) that generate text are trained on extremely large datasets, and they learn statistical patterns in order to predict the next word in a sentence. Inhere...