ChatGPT loves the em dash (—). Your readers noticed. Paste your text and replace every em dash — plus the other AI typography tells — in one click.
🔒 100% private — your text never leaves this browser tabLarge language models were trained on edited, published prose — books, journalism, essays — where professional typesetting uses true em dashes (—) instead of the plain hyphen (-) most people type. So AI text reaches for the em dash constantly, while ordinary keyboard writing almost never contains the real Unicode character (U+2014). That mismatch turned the em dash into one of the most cited "AI tells" of the ChatGPT era.
Paste your text and TextWash converts every em dash, en dash (–), horizontal bar, non-breaking hyphen and Unicode minus to a plain keyboard hyphen, tidying the surrounding spaces. It also straightens curly quotes, fixes real ellipsis characters (…), strips invisible watermark characters, and flags AI cliché phrases so you can rewrite them in your own voice. Everything runs locally in your browser — your text is never uploaded.
Em dash (—, U+2014): the long one, used for asides — like this. En dash (–, U+2013): ranges, like 2019–2026. Hyphen (-): what your keyboard actually types. AI text is full of the first two; hand-typed text almost always uses the third.
Almost nobody types the true em dash character (U+2014) by hand — it requires a special keyboard shortcut. AI models output it constantly because their training data is professionally typeset text. A document dense with em dashes therefore reads as machine-written to many editors and detectors.
Em dashes become a plain hyphen with a single space on each side; en dashes, horizontal bars and Unicode minus signs become plain hyphens. You can toggle this off if you want to keep your dashes.
No. The tool is plain JavaScript running entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent, stored or logged.