Commas, dashes, semicolons, and spaces have shaped how we read for centuries. What happens when machines start crafting the sentences? Jane Austen favored dashes. Her editors may have applied the commas we now think of as unmistakably Austenian. Illustration by Abraham Lule Do you know the first sentence of “ Pride and Prejudice ”? You probably think you do, but I bet you don’t. The answer is “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Did you remember to put in the commas? What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. Did Jane Austen even write them? Probably not. Judging by her few surviving manuscripts, Austen didn’t much use commas (or paragraphs). She used dashes.…