But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such as "crucial". It's that most LLM articles on LinkedIn or on personal blogs just take a one-sentence prompt and dress it up into a lot of pointless words, wasting everyone's time: "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be far fewer of them?
On the flip side, if you're a human and actually have something of consequence to say, "delve" all you want.
Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.
Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.
And looking at its suggestions, they are not very good. People are better developing their own writing style than trusting generic advice meant for common-denominator writing.
Inputting Japanese sentences of any length flags the whole sentence as "Dramatic Fragment: A standalone paragraph with ≤4 words".
I'm building writetrack.dev - a writing signal sdk that helps folks understand proof of process. It takes a different approach to writing analysis and I'm pretty sure the logo will never feature a brown turd.
Seems like a sad situation, but I'm not going to start changing my communication style to avoid sounding like an LLM. At least not yet.
Also, it was painful to learn that my very first blog post I wrote in 2013 is AI generated. But I'm fine with it because I read this:
> A short punchy opener (≤10 words) followed by two or more substantially longer elaboration sentences — the LLM "hook then evidence pile" rhythm.
... and realized that the entire app is AI generated.
Always gotta have In This AI Era of Ours. Because even if you fail to convince the reader of the point you ostensibly were trying to make you still get to tediously skull-bang about The AI Era. And it only costs tokens.
> Staccato Burst Three or more consecutive very short sentences at matching cadence.
This is real. It’s not your imagination. AI is here and eating your lunch/AI is psychologically draining/The unemployment lines are unusually long.
Cleans up content. Less about critiquing and giving feedback, more just “give me the better output”
Slop is stopped by allowing unique quirks to flourish. Do you speak in 'staccato bursts'? THEN FUCKING WRITE IN STACCATO BURSTS! Do you need a 'throat clearing opener? THEN FUCKING USE ONE!
Human language does not need to take progressive steps toward some universal standard. Having one is fine, in theory, but the beauty lies in how we solve for our inability to consistently utilize it. Adding mechanism to every step removes the beauty. Stop being the problem.
This doesn't detect AI slop. It's just a grammarly/copilot clone.
While it's important for universities to continue to teach the ability to write using 'flowery' language I think that it is also important that schools teach students something like BLUF -- Bottom Line Upfront.[0]
Compare and contrast those two sentences. I'm fine writing a comment that us just the first sentence and the link without a footnote but I know as a message it won't go over well on a site like Hackernews. They looooooove their verbosity here.
So in some situations you have to gussy it up -- give it some of that Emeril "BAM". The deal is that you have to know your audience. The medium is the message.[1] shit like that.
Stuff on Linkedin is full of pointless words because that's what Linkedin is for -- it's about signalling to other people that you can string together a bunch of pointless words that are effusive and vaguely passive aggressive at the same time -- you know, typical business shit.
“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”
We can delve into this kinda stuff but really it just comes back to the know your audience and that the medium is the message. Also don't repeat your self.
Definitely don't repeat yourself.
My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.
She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.
French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.
I'm so over this idiocy. It's gotten to the point that the "haha, gotcha!" AI claims are more annoying than AI slop itself. God forbid you use a semicolon or an em dash or an interesting sentence structure to break things up, because someone will be quick to point out the "proof" that it's machine generated.
Now I have a name for the thing I despise the most about AI writing.
> Overused Intensifier - Delete it. If the sentence still makes sense, the word was never needed. If it doesn't, rewrite the sentence to show why it matters.
You heard it here first. Adjectives? More like AIdjectives, a covert plan by AI companies to make our writing more sloppy. According to this recommendation, writing should never have any emphasis, it should only contain the most basic "X is Y" relations, like in some programming language. Sentences should contain the bare minimum amount of information required to parse them, everything else must be cut. In practice, this recommendation only filters a few of the most pervasive 'corporate PowerPoint'-style language, but even then, the suggestion that these words are never useful is wrong.
> Triple Construction - Break the pattern. Use two items or four. Or convert one item into its own sentence to give it more weight.
Humans may really like when things are structured into threes, but you must resist this AI temptation! Use two or four points, because you're not like them. The only reason cited for why this is wrong is that LLMs use this pattern often, so naturally the rest of us must cede good writing practices to them.
> "Almost" Hedge - Commit. "Almost always" → "usually." Or just say "always" and defend the claim. Readers notice when you won't take a stance.
As we all know, the world is discrete and easy to describe. That's why there simply isn't anything between things that happen "usually" (70%) and "always" (100%). Saying "almost always" (95%) is bad, because you should round your estimates and defend what is now an obviously wrong statement, for it makes you seem more brutal and confident.
> "Broader Implications" - State the implication explicitly, or cut the phrase. "This has broader implications" says nothing. What are the implications? Say them.
God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear, temporarily withholding some information for the sake of organization. Asking to can the phrase entirely says that even complex writing should be strung together in a rigid and sequential order.
That's the problem with the project, the way I see it. It was too heavily inspired by Grammarly and the likes, and in chasing it, the criticisms were adapted to fit the Grammarly model. The issue with that LLM 'style' is the punchy, continuous overuse of these patterns to the point where these phrases start seeming like meaningless sound combinations. There's nothing wrong with most of these patterns individually, what I hate is when text is filled with them to the brim, not when they show at all. If your writing is like the example paragraph, with most of the text highlighted, then it's a sign that your essay is more rhetoric than substance. But if you write an argument with three items in it and it's highlighted because "that's like AI" to make you delete it, then that's performative self-censorship, not improving your writing.
Yes, I see the message about it staying local. No, I don't trust the message or that you will never be hacked.
Ultimately slop is so pervasive that I'm wasting a fair amount of time vetting text and it's affecting my ability to simply enjoy reading. I keep getting part way into an article before realizing it's low quality ai writing. Being able to get a quick heads up that it looks like ai before starting would save me a lot of energy even on articles I decide to try reading because it cuts down on mental overhead.
Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.
Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.
Your writing style, if not your thoughts, have already been infected by LLM prose.
Over the years the amount of basic copy editing I have to do has really grown. I sometimes feel like I’m removing 20%+ of the text. And that was before LLMs.
Not to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).
Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
The way the OP used the 'not X, but Y' pattern, the 'X' and 'Y' are two clear, specific, and (most importantly) distinct things, as opposed to stereotypical LLM usage where they're vague characterizations or metaphors. And there's a reason to emphasize that it's not X, because the Slop Cop website implicitly suggests that it is X.
The LLM tic, by contrast, has a noticeable tendency to be deployed even when X has never been previously mentioned. It is a valid rhetorical technique, and I assume that's why the LLMs have picked up on it - but it has to be deployed judiciously. Which is something LLMs appear absolutely incapable of doing. And that is why people notice it, and think it sucks.
I think it's important to choose the right medium for communication though. Some things just need to be written out concisely.
and I'll never give up on em dashes
If you have measurable amplifications, use them. "This outcome was 40% more frequent". Otherwise keep emotion out of documents, unless you're writing a novel.
> God forbid you organize an essay that's in any way non-linear...
"The implications are listed in Table 1 of Annex A"
Job done, the reader can jump there and return. I read a document for information, not for some movie-director suspenseful build-up and revelation.
It works reasonably well (better if you run it a few times), but still benefits from a final pass by a human editor IMO.
For hundreds of years there have been incentives (money) to publish books, and yet in 2026 we still haven’t worked out how to monetarily incentivise authors of single articles without bundling them with articles or other authors you wouldn’t read (because you only care about a single article damnit
fake prompt> To sound smart, use as much literary tricks from LinkedIn Grow Hackers as possible.
If they prompt asked to sound like Strawberry Shortcake, the AI pudding would be full of berry interesting cooking analogies.
Cheating? Maybe. But it's a silly metric to begin with, and obviously the teacher didn't actually care about the count because I got an A in most of my essays.
When I first started out, I was taught you use passive voice in proposals (eg 'a program will be written..' not 'I will write a program...') since you didn't know who was actually going to write it. I can't imagine how that would go over now...
Edit: I would add that you literally followed the formula in every respect except for a single word, and IMO LLMs are already changing to avoid the single-word formulation.