Signals Copy tells
Em dash density
- Category
- Copy tells
- Direction
- Pushes the score up
- Weight
- +8
What it is
How the words were written. A human under deadline writes like this too. Copy tells are suggestive, never conclusive.
How it is weighted
8 points is mid-weight: real evidence, not a smoking gun. On its own it moves the number a few points.
What to do about it
Break the long dashed clauses into shorter sentences. Vary the sentence rhythm.
Where it fires
Of the homepages we scan as worked examples, this signal fired on one:
- base44.com 82/100 — 33 em dashes across 9162 characters (3.6 per 1k).