Craft Glossary · term

Tic / machine-tell / LLM tell

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Plain English: A recurring small habit that gives away the writer — and for AI prose, a machine-tell is a pattern that makes text read as machine-written: over-balanced sentences, the "Not X. Y." reframe, em-dash addiction, "the way she…" similes, rule-of-three lists, AI vocabulary clusters, captioning what was just shown. The de-LLM effort hunts these so prose reads like a person wrote it.

Rule: Tells are counted, not banned. Each has a target band; clusters flag for surgical cut. The deepest fix is modulation — plain beside lyrical, short beside long, a situated speaker with a stake — not swapping one template for another.

Fail: Mechanical purge — deleting every em dash and "delve" without fixing cadence (cargo- cult de-LLM). Denial — "my draft doesn't sound like AI" when every paragraph uses the reframe.

See: LLM tics & tells — full catalog · Negative parallelism · Em-dash tics · The "the way…" simile · Anti-Patterns

Arjuna Badger Press · Craft Library

Glossary · Doctrine · Anti-patterns · Triptych form · LLM tells

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