There’s a well-worn list of AI tells going around. Em dashes. “Delve.” “It’s not X, it’s Y.”
Those are word-level tells. They’re easy to spot, easy to strip, and by now most people who care have a find-and-replace list.
The tell I want to talk about survives all of that. Most people can’t name it, so they decide the piece needs another pass. Then they go around in circles.
Here it is.
In AI writing, every sentence is trying to be the best sentence in the paragraph. Which means none of them are allowed to be the setup.
I use AI for almost everything I write, so this is not a complaint piece. I’m hard pro-AI in content if you have something to say and know how to edit. This is about the specific thing I now look for first.
First, feel it
Read this paragraph. Don’t analyse it yet.
Every marketer wants leverage, but leverage without a system is just faster chaos. The tools aren’t the bottleneck. Your undocumented process is. Most teams automate the symptom and keep the disease. You can’t scale judgment you’ve never written down. AI doesn’t replace thinking, it exposes whether you were doing any. The teams winning right now aren’t the ones with the best models. They’re the ones with the clearest instructions.
Nothing in there is wrong. Several of those lines would do fine as a tagline on their own.
Now notice what you’re left with. You read seven sentences and you’re carrying nothing. There’s no person in it, no sequence, nowhere your attention was allowed to rest. If I asked you to tell me what it said, you couldn’t.
That flat, mildly exhausted feeling is the thing. You’ve had it hundreds of times this year, maybe more.
Here’s the same idea with the feed lines put back:
I spent a year automating the wrong things. I’d find a task that annoyed me, build a workflow for it, and then rewrite the output by hand anyway. It took me embarrassingly long to work out why. I had never written down how I did the task when I did it myself. I only knew how it felt to do it. A workflow can’t run on a feeling.
Same number of lines. Half of them do no work on their own. “I spent a year automating the wrong things” isn’t quotable. It’s a feed line. It exists to buy attention for the sentence after it.
That’s what’s missing from the first version - feed lines.
What compression actually is
I’ve been calling this compression, and I’m keeping the word, but I need to fix what it sounds like before it does damage.
Compression sounds like concise. Concise is good. Cutting every word a sentence can live without is one of the oldest rules in writing and I’m not arguing with it.
Compression is a different operation. Compression is when every line arrives already concluded.
Comedy is the clearest way to see it. A joke needs a feed line and a punchline, and the feed line is not a weak punchline. It’s a different job. AI writes all punchlines. Given a feed line, it doesn’t leave it alone and it doesn’t cut it. It promotes it.
Which is why compression very often means more words, not fewer. That confused me for weeks. Two operations are running and only one of them shortens anything.
Merging. Three sentences fuse into one. Sequence collapses into a list.
Mine: I asked it to tighten the paragraph. It gave me back something shorter. I read it twice before I worked out what bothered me.
Compressed: I asked for tighter, got shorter, and read it twice before I could name what was off.
Capping. You left the point for the reader to work out. It says it out loud anyway, and dresses it up.
Mine: ...so every paragraph ends on a slogan. Nobody writes like this.
Compressed: ...so everything arrives sounding like a slogan. One quotable line is a good line. Nine in a row is a highlight reel.
The second version is longer than mine. It’s also more compressed, because it took a plain human reaction and upgraded it into a bit. “Nobody writes like this” is me shrugging. The other one is a line from a keynote.
When compression is right
Compression isn’t always a flaw.
Plenty of humans write in punchlines. Copywriters do. Good headline writers do it for a living.
It’s exactly what you want in a headline, a hook, an ad, a tagline, a slide. Anywhere the line has to survive alone, with no paragraph around it to hold it up, you want it fully resolved. AI is genuinely good at this and I use it for exactly that.
The problem is that it does it everywhere. It writes headlines when you ask for paragraphs.
The uncomfortable part
Writing this article was awkward, because an article about slogan density gets read with a microscope, and every decent line in it becomes evidence against me.
Also, I write compressed sentences. Not because AI put them there. When I’m pleased with an idea I want to make it land, and I used to do that long before AI.
Which tells you what’s still worth being good at. Models produce good sentences all day now. Somebody still has to know which nine out of ten to take back out.
The prompt
This is what I’ve added to my editing skill. It runs before anything else, because if the draft is compressed, no other edit will fix the feeling.
You are checking a draft for compression. Compression is when every sentence is trying to be the best sentence in the paragraph. Each line arrives already concluded, leaving no feed lines and no room for the reader to do any work. A feed line is a sentence whose only job is to prepare the one after it; it is not meant to stand alone. Compression is not the same as concision. Do not shorten anything.
Flag every instance of the following, quoting the sentence:
Merging. Two or more separate observations fused into one line, usually as a serial list or with a contrast structure. Sequence and cause have been flattened.
Capping. A concluding clause or sentence that states a takeaway the surrounding text already implies. Check the last sentence of every paragraph. Include any claim that appears in the edited version but not in the original, and quote both.
Promoted feed lines. A feed line rewritten so that it lands on its own.
Density. Count the paragraphs ending on a quotable line. Report the number and the total.
Then report the ratio of feed lines to landing sentences. In natural prose, most sentences are feed lines.
Do not rewrite yet. Show me the flags, then ask which ones I want unpacked.
The “do not rewrite yet” line matters more than it looks. If you let it fix everything in one pass it will compress the fixes.
Try it this week
Take something you drafted with AI in the last month and liked. Not something you were suspicious of. Something you were pleased with.
Run the prompt on that draft and see whether it points to something you’ve felt but couldn’t put into words.
Thank you for reading!
Ina