Testing & debugging · joshuadavidthomas/agent-skills
ai-writing-tropes
Detect and eliminate common AI writing tropes from prose. Use when drafting, editing, or reviewing text to avoid the predictable patterns that mark AI-generated writing.
By Joshua David Thomas · MIT
Comprehensive catalog of AI writing patterns that make text feel machine-generated. Any single pattern used once might be fine. The problem is when multiple tropes appear together or when one trope repeats throughout a piece.
How to Use
When writing or editing prose:
- Draft the content.
- Check against the trope categories below.
- If you spot a pattern, rewrite that passage.
- Re-read the whole piece for pattern density — a few is tolerable, a cluster is not.
Trope Categories
Word Choice
Overused vocabulary and phrasing that AI defaults to. See references/word-choice.md.
Key offenders: "quietly", "delve", "tapestry", "landscape", "serves as", "leverage", "robust", "harness", "streamline".
Sentence Structure
Formulaic sentence patterns that no human writes at scale. See references/sentence-structure.md.
Key offenders: negative parallelism ("not X — it's Y"), dramatic countdowns ("Not X. Not Y. Just Z."), self-posed rhetorical questions, anaphora abuse, tricolon abuse, gerund fragment litanies.
Paragraph Structure
Layout and organization patterns that betray AI generation. See references/paragraph-structure.md.
Key offenders: short punchy fragments as standalone paragraphs, listicles disguised as prose.
Tone
Voice and framing habits that sound performative. See references/tone.md.
Key offenders: false suspense ("Here's the kicker"), patronizing analogies ("Think of it as..."), false vulnerability, stakes inflation, vague attributions, invented concept labels.
Formatting
Visual and typographic tells. See references/formatting.md.
Key offenders: em-dash addiction, bold-first bullets, unicode decoration.
Composition
Document-level structural problems. See references/composition.md.
Key offenders: fractal summaries, dead metaphors beaten into the ground, historical analogy stacking, one-point dilution, signposted conclusions.
Quick Self-Check
Before delivering prose, ask:
- Did I use the same sentence structure more than twice in a row?
- Did I use "not X — it's Y" or "Here's the thing" anywhere?
- Did I stack three or more historical examples back-to-back?
- Did I inflate the stakes beyond what the content warrants?
- Would a human actually write a first draft this way?
- Does any passage sound like it belongs on a motivational poster?
The One Rule
Write like a human: varied, imperfect, specific.