How do I remove em dashes in Word?

Use Find and Replace. Press Ctrl+H on Windows (on a Mac, go to Edit, Find, Replace), type ^+ in the Find what box, which is Word's code for an em dash, type a comma and a space in Replace with, and choose Replace All. Em dash overuse is one of the best-known signs of AI writing, and Remove AI Tells recommends clearing them out of any draft that started in ChatGPT, Copilot or another AI tool.

Step 1: Replace spaced em dashes first

Some AI text puts a space on each side of the dash. Search for a space, ^+ and another space, and replace it with a comma and a space. Doing this first stops you ending up with double spaces.

Step 2: Replace the rest

Search for ^+ on its own and replace it with a comma and a space. Two ideas joined by a dash become two ideas joined by a comma.

Step 3: Handle en dashes

Search for ^=, Word's code for an en dash. For number ranges like 2024 to 2026, a plain hyphen is fine.

Step 4: Read it through

Replace All is blind. Some dashes read better as a period, a colon or parentheses, so skim the result and fix any sentence that now runs on.

Word's special character codes

• ^+ em dash
• ^= en dash
• ^s non-breaking space
• ^~ non-breaking hyphen
• ^- optional (soft) hyphen
• ^u followed by a number finds any character by its Unicode code, for example ^u8212 for an em dash

The faster option

Paste the text into the free Remove AI Tells scanner. It swaps em dashes, en dashes and curly quotes for plain punctuation, removes invisible characters and highlights stock AI phrases, all in your browser. Then paste the clean text back into Word. For why AI leans on the dash so much, see the em dash AI tell. For every Microsoft app, see how to remove AI tells in Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint.