The em-dash em-beds in Congress: A population-level rise in em-dash frequency in U.S. congressional press releases at the dawn of the large-language-model era, 2021-2025
Large language models (LLMs) can leave small stylistic traces in text written with their help. The most discussed is the em-dash (U+2014), especially the unspaced form word---word, which is normal in typeset English prose but unusual in U.S. press writing, where AP style calls for spaced dashes. This study asks whether that trace is measurable in congressional press releases. In a preregistered design (OSF: 10.17605/OSF.IO/U5NEY), 146,239 scraper-sourced releases from 480 House and Senate offices (2021-2025, the open congress-press dataset) were analyzed: density of unspaced prose-form em-dashes per 1,000 characters of cleaned text, Poisson/negative-binomial models with a length offset, c...
| Authors | Przemysław Czuma |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DL |
| Published | 6 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 August 2026 |
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