Em Dash Remover
The em dash (—) has become the most recognizable "AI tell" in written text. Paste your text below and convert every em dash to a comma, hyphen or space — while also cleaning the invisible characters most tools miss.
🔒 Runs 100% in your browser — your text never leaves this page.
Why AI text is full of em dashes
Large language models were trained on edited prose — books, journalism, essays — where professional editors use em dashes liberally. The result: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini reach for the em dash far more often than everyday writers do, and readers have learned to spot it. If you publish AI-assisted writing, normalizing em dashes is the single highest-impact edit you can make.
What the modes do
Comma (default): "The results were clear—the test worked" becomes "The results were clear, the test worked". This reads most naturally in the majority of sentences.
Hyphen: keeps a visual break: "clear - the test worked". Useful for casual or technical writing.
Space: simply joins the clauses with a space. Best when you plan to re-punctuate by hand.
Keep: leaves em dashes alone so you can use the other cleaners (invisible characters, smart quotes) without touching your dashes.
More than a find-and-replace
A plain find-and-replace misses the spaces around the dash ("word — word" turns into "word , word" with double spaces) and does nothing about the en dashes, horizontal bars and minus signs that look identical. This tool trims surrounding whitespace correctly and normalizes the whole dash family — plus the 17 kinds of invisible characters that often ride along in AI text.
FAQ
Does removing em dashes make text undetectable as AI?
No single edit does that. But em dashes are the most cited stylistic giveaway, and this tool also removes the invisible Unicode characters that automated detectors actually measure. Treat it as one step in a human editing pass, not a magic wand.
Is the replacement grammatically safe?
The comma mode reads naturally in most sentences, but em dashes are versatile — a few sentences may deserve a period or parentheses instead. Skim the output; the tool is built for a fast first pass.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser — the page works even offline.