Why Does ChatGPT uses em dashes and Microsoft Word Keep Adding Dashes Everywhere? (Here’s How to Delete Them All)

The Annoying Problem Nobody Talks About

You copy text from a website, PDF, or old document. You paste it into your fresh new doc and BAM: dashes everywhere. Not regular hyphens. Weird long dashes (—) that mess up your formatting and make your text look broken.

Or maybe you wrote something in Microsoft Word and it auto-replaced your regular hyphens with fancy em dashes without asking. Now you need clean text but manually finding and deleting every single dash sounds like torture.

The Dash Remover exists for exactly this moment.

What This Tool Does

It finds every type of dash in your text (em dashes, en dashes, regular hyphens used as separators) and removes them. You get clean, dash-free text in seconds.

You also get three removal options:

1. Remove ALL dashes (every single one)
2. Remove only em dashes and en dashes (keeps normal hyphens in words like “re-apply”)
3. Remove dashes and replace them with spaces (for better readability)

How to Use It

Step 1: Open the tool From your dashboard, click “Dash Remover.” You’ll see a text box with a helpful note explaining what gets removed.

Step 2: Paste your messy text Copy the text with those annoying dashes and paste it into the box. Don’t worry about how many dashes there are. The tool will find them all.

Step 3: Choose your removal style You’ll see three buttons:

• “Remove All Dashes”: Deletes every dash (em dashes, en dashes, hyphens used as separators)
• “Remove Em & En Only”: Deletes long dashes but keeps normal hyphens in hyphenated words
• “Remove & Add Spaces”: Deletes dashes and puts spaces where they were (useful for sentences broken by dashes)

Click the one that matches what you need.

Step 4: Review the cleaned text Your cleaned text appears in the result box below. You’ll also see how many dashes were removed and the new word count.

Step 5: Copy and use Hit “Copy Cleaned Text” and your dash-free text is ready to paste anywhere.

Where This Saves Your Sanity

Copying from PDFs: You download a research paper or e-book as a PDF. You need to quote a section in your project. You copy the text but it’s FULL of weird dashes that don’t belong. Paste it into the Dash Remover, clean it up, and now your quote looks professional.

Website Content Migration: You’re moving content from an old website to a new one. The old content has em dashes everywhere (because some writer loved using them). You need clean text for the new site. Run it through the Dash Remover and problem solved.

Microsoft Word Auto-Correct Madness: Word has this “smart” feature where it replaces two hyphens (–) with an em dash (—) automatically. You didn’t want that. You paste your text into the Dash Remover, clean it up, and paste it back. Word can’t auto-correct what isn’t there.

Cleaning Up Old Documents: You have a 50-page document from 2015. Back then, you used dashes everywhere like it was cool. Now you need clean, professional text. Instead of manually deleting hundreds of dashes, you run it through the tool. Instant cleanup.

Preparing Text for Forms: You’re filling out an online form (maybe a visa application or job portal). These forms HATE special characters, including fancy dashes. They either reject the text or display it as weird symbols. Remove all dashes before pasting to avoid issues.

Understanding the Three Removal Options

Option 1: Remove All Dashes This is the nuclear option. It removes:

• Em dashes (—)
• En dashes (–)
• Hyphens used as separators (like “Lagos – Ibadan” becomes “Lagos Ibadan”)

USE THIS WHEN: You want absolutely no dashes anywhere, even in hyphenated words.

WARNING: This will also remove hyphens from words like “self-esteem” (becomes “selfesteem”). If your text has properly hyphenated words, use Option 2 instead.

Option 2: Remove Em & En Only This is the smart option. It removes:

• Em dashes (—)
• En dashes (–)

But KEEPS:

• Regular hyphens in hyphenated words (like “part-time,” “well-known,” “co-worker”)

USE THIS WHEN: You want to clean up fancy dashes but preserve normal hyphenation.

Option 3: Remove & Add Spaces This removes all dashes AND replaces them with spaces. So “Lagos-Ibadan-Expressway” becomes “Lagos Ibadan Expressway.”

USE THIS WHEN: The dashes were separating words or phrases and you want readable text.

WARNING: This can create double spaces if there were already spaces next to the dashes. The tool auto-cleans this, but double-check your text.

Tips You Won’t Find Anywhere Else

Tip 1: Clean before pasting into forms Government websites, job portals, and visa applications HATE special characters. Always run your text through the Dash Remover before submitting anything to online forms.

Tip 2: Use “Remove Em & En Only” by default Unless you have a specific reason to nuke ALL dashes, this option is safest. It cleans up the problematic fancy dashes while keeping your text grammatically correct.

Tip 3: Check the stats After removal, the tool shows you how many dashes were removed. If it says “0 dashes removed,” your text was already clean. No harm done.

Tip 4: Combine with other tools After removing dashes, you might want to check word count (use the Word Counter) or fix capitalization (use the Case Converter). Build a workflow that stacks these tools for maximum efficiency.

Tip 5: Save a cleaned version If you’re working on a document that you’ll edit multiple times, clean it ONCE with the Dash Remover and save that version. Don’t keep pasting the messy original over and over.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Mistake 1: Removing all dashes when you shouldn’t If your text has words like “e-mail,” “re-apply,” or “father-in-law,” don’t use “Remove All Dashes.” You’ll end up with “email,” “reapply,” and “fatherinlaw,” which might not be what you want.

Mistake 2: Not reviewing after removal Always check the cleaned text before using it. Sometimes a dash was actually important for meaning (like “9am-5pm” becoming “9am5pm” instead of “9am to 5pm”).

Mistake 3: Forgetting about context If you remove dashes from a sentence like “She walked into the room, confident, powerful, and the entire room fell silent,” it still makes sense. But if you remove dashes from technical text or code, you might break something. Context matters.

Mistake 4: Using the tool on final-formatted text Don’t apply this to text that’s already been carefully formatted for publication. Use it during the EDITING phase, not the final review phase.

When NOT to Use This Tool

Don’t use it for:

• Dates written as “01-01-2024” (unless you want “01012024”)
• Phone numbers like “080-1234-5678” (unless you want “08012345678”)
• URLs or email addresses (dashes are part of the address)
• Code or technical documentation (dashes might be functional)
• Mathematical expressions (like “5-3=2”)

Why This Tool Exists

Dashes are grammatically useful. Em dashes (—) can replace commas, parentheses, or colons. En dashes (–) show ranges (“9am–5pm”). But online? They’re a formatting nightmare.

They break forms. They look weird in plain text. They cause encoding issues. And when you copy/paste text between different platforms, dashes often turn into weird symbols or question marks.

The Dash Remover fixes all of this. It’s a simple tool, but it solves a real, annoying problem that every writer, student, and professional faces.

Bottom Line

If you’ve ever copied text and found yourself manually deleting dashes one by one, you need this tool. It’s fast, it’s accurate, and it has options for different use cases.

Clean up PDFs. Fix old documents. Prepare text for forms. Remove auto-corrections you didn’t want. Whatever your dash problem is, this tool solves it in 5 seconds.

Stop deleting manually. Start using the Dash Remover. Your time is too valuable for that nonsense.