The em dash has become the tell-tale punctuation of AI writing. Paste your text to replace every — and – with a plain hyphen, keeping number ranges like 2–3 tidy as 2-3.
For ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini & Copilot answers: markdown, citations, tracking links, long dashes and hidden characters cleaned up.
Paste
Paste anything.
Press CtrlV anywhere on this page, drop a text file, or try an example:
Clean
1 Paste text on the left
2 See what’s hiding in the X-ray
3 Copy it back, clean
Fixes20 rules on · 0 changes made
Hidden characters
AI & markdown
Typography
Layout & spacing
Keyboard: Ctrl+Enter copies the clean text, Ctrl+Shift+Enter copies rich text, keys 1 to 6 switch presets, X toggles the X-ray.
What changes
Em dash (—) and horizontal bar (―) become a spaced hyphen: “simple—fast” → “simple - fast”.
En dash (–) in number ranges becomes a hyphen without spaces: “6–8 weeks” → “6-8 weeks”.
Minus sign (−) becomes a regular hyphen-minus.
With the AI text preset, curly quotes, apostrophes and the single-character ellipsis (…) are straightened too. Untick them in Fixes if you only want the dashes changed.
Should you remove em dashes?
Em dashes are perfectly good punctuation, and many great writers use them. But because AI assistants use them so heavily, a draft full of them can read as machine-written. Many editors also prefer a consistent style, and some systems (older CMSs, SMS, forms) mangle typographic dashes. Replacing them is a quick way to make text consistent.
Honestly though: swapping punctuation won’t fool an AI detector, which looks at wording. If a draft sounds generic, rewrite it.
FAQ
What’s the difference between an em dash and an en dash?
An em dash (—) is the long dash used to break a sentence. An en dash (–) is shorter and is used for ranges such as 2–3 or pages 10–20. A hyphen (-) joins words.
Can I replace em dashes with commas instead?
Not automatically, because the right replacement depends on the sentence. ClepBoard uses a spaced hyphen, which is always grammatically safe to read.