The six shapes it looks for
Deny-lists of tired words are easy and mostly useless: transform is filler in transform your business and exactly right in we transform the flour at four in the morning. What readers actually pattern-match is structure, and once they clock it they discount the claim as well as the prose.
- Not just X, but Y
- The single most recognisable machine-written construction, and it contains no unusual words at all, which is why a banned-word list never catches it. Not just coffee, but a morning ritual. Say the second half straight and delete the first.
- The question it answers itself
- Opening on a question and replying in three words. Want better bread? You do. It reads as a presenter warming up an audience, and the reader came for the point.
- The reassuring last line
- A closing sentence that restates the piece without adding to it. And that is what makes all the difference. It feels like an ending, which is why it survives edits, and it carries nothing.
- Every sentence the same length
- Human writing varies. A run of sentences all around the same length has a rhythm readers register before they can name it. Only flagged over five sentences, because on three a steady length is chance rather than a habit.
- The three-item list, twice
- Fresh, local and friendly. Once is good writing. Twice in one piece is the rhythm taking over, so this only fires on the second one.
- A dash where a full stop belongs
- Our own house rule, applied to our own copy as well as yours. Only the long dash is flagged: a short dash between numbers is correct typography and half the opening hours in Britain are written with one.
Why there is no score
Every tool in this category gives you a percentage, and the percentage is invented. There is no measurement of how machine-written a piece of text is: there are heuristics, and a heuristic turned into a number stops looking like an opinion. These checks are deliberately conservative and every one of them can be wrong about your writing, which is a sentence you can only honestly print next to findings rather than next to a verdict.
It is also worth saying plainly: a piece of writing can contain all six of these and be the right piece of writing. The list tells you what a reader might notice. You decide whether you meant it.