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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1256 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 22, 2026

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Given the relatively high median eloquence of posters on this site, perhaps it's the wrong place to ask but I've been dealing with a rather frustrating issue. I find that my natural writing style (which I've had since I started writing essays in grade school with the usual refinements that come with age) tends to be pretty easily mistaken for LLM-style writing. I don't really know what that says about me as a person. Regardless, I've cut out em-dashes and negative parallelisms despite having used them for years. Anyone else encounter this issue and has it changed your approach to writing at all?

Never been accused of writing like an LLM, no. Maybe it’ll happen one day though. People have said I tend to be overly descriptive or over explain things. It’s become a necessary habit overtime after seeing more than a few pseudo-intellectual jackasses “ackshually,” their way through your argument, as if they’ve said anything meaningful or substantive against point. My natural writing style takes the form of shutting off and closing the door to objections I’m anticipating, so it rigidly keeps my interlocutor on track and focused on what I’m saying. It’s a fairly well known phenomenon in the psychology of argument that people tend to ignore all the strong and conclusive evidence you can muster, then pick on the weakest point in your argument, writing an objection against that and then ignore all the rest of what you’ve said. That kind of behavior annoys me as well. It’s also why adding a bad argument to your armamentarium of good arguments actually worsens your case. Because when people think they can refute your bad argument, they automatically assume they can do the same to the rest of your arguments and don’t bother to address it at all.

Not really? The most obvious AI tells (em dashes, negative parallelisms, didactic disclaimers, emojis as formatting, etc.) are things I have never used in my writing. AI is aiming for some combination of HR inoffensive, highbrow literary, and "how do you do fellow kids"; none of it matches my style.

I’ve almost entirely abandoned negative parallelisms, and I’ve become much more judicious in my use of the em-dash. If I’m writing for an audience who knows nothing about me (for example, reference letters, external emails, and job application cover letters), I avoid em-dashes entirely.

Yeah, the em dash has been destroyed. It's infuriating, because there are so many sentences that are punchier with a dash thrown in.

I'm glad in many ways that I finished my bachelor's in a writing-heavy field before the advent of generative AI.

I’ve become much more judicious in my use of the em-dash

The Chad solution to this is to accept that there is only one dash and that it is also hyphen and the minus sign. Aka the ascii character 0x2D.

What is this, the 1970s? Even then, typists knew to use two hyphens for an en-dash and three for an em-dash.

Nah, that's not the Chad solution — the Chad solution is to start overusing the em dash even if you've never used them before and have to ask AI how to find it on your phone keyboard. It doesn't just show that you don't care about being mistaken for an LLM — it shows that you revel in it! And the best part? You're not just using em dashes — you're weaponizing them. And honestly? That's the real Chad move.

Thanks, I hate it.

You can pry my minus sign dash from my cold, dead hands.

I haven't encountered it. I've tried changing my writing by removing extra crap. Having shorter writing probably helps.

all LLMs actually trained on your essays, which is why they took your styles. even their alter-name AI is derived from your username. see.

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