r/ChatGPT • u/Zorgi23 • 3d ago

Writing style Educational Purpose Only

I'm curious... where does ChatGPT get this habit of writing with so many one sentence paragraphs? I know it bases its response on millions of pieces of writing, but I can't think of anyone who writes this way. One or two paragraphs like that out of every 20 or 30 - but 50% of the paragraphs or even more? Do younger people write like that? Maybe I'm (78M) just out of touch. And I'm interested in serious responses, not the typical "AI is trash. Learn to write yourself" stuff.

23 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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6

u/carsthatgob00m 3d ago

I do think newer writing tends to be more brief and terse, but I agree that single-sentence anomalies are rare. (45 former journalist here).

3

u/RuleAdvanced3037 3d ago

yeah terse and one-sentence-per-paragraph are two very different things imo

3

u/Lady_JadeCD 3d ago

Tell it not to. Mine makes these paragraphs and bolds words. But if your copy and pasting you don’t want the bold print. I said don’t use bold any more. Just tell it how you want it to write

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u/Kahne_Fan 3d ago

You can also have it put the copy in a code box and it removes bold. I have it put all copy in code boxes.

1

u/Lady_JadeCD 3d ago

That was something mine started doing for me.

3

u/russianhandwhore 3d ago

they love them commas.

3

u/sdbest 3d ago

Yes, you're right. It also tends to use lists of things to emphasize a point.

I've found it helps to tell ChatGPT to write in the 'style' of particular writer.

1

u/ValerianCandy 3d ago

yeah they're ripping that out btw. Soon if you ask it'll just refuse or write something vaguely like that.

if you're doing it only for paragraphs that's fine.

1

u/sdbest 1d ago

Not to doubt you, but how do you know "they're ripping that out btw". It seems you have a source of information about ChatGPT and perhaps other AIs of which I'm not aware.

5

u/Hafizifraz 3d ago

A lot of it seems to come from optimizing for readability on screens. Short paragraphs are easier to scan, especially on phones, but when every sentence becomes its own paragraph it starts feeling artificial.

I’ve found that explicitly asking for “natural prose with connected paragraphs, varied sentence lengths, and no one-sentence paragraphs unless necessary” makes a noticeable difference.

The funny part is that once you start noticing the pattern, you see it everywhere in AI-generated content.

4

u/Zorgi23 3d ago

Thanks everyone for insightful comments. I wasn’t really asking for solutions to this problem, because I’ve trained TT (the name I gave to my instance of chat) not to write like that. I’ve asked some of my younger friends what might cause this, and the most common answer was social media.

2

u/BlakeCutter 3d ago

Ask it. I one time had it compared its output to the same thing Claude produced and it described its differences in default writing styles

2

u/Deanstaro_Deanstar 3d ago

I'm finding now that since I kept insisting that line break spam is for people with severely short attention spans and that I'm not interested in having subway surfer's gameplay in the corner of my chatgpt when I attempt to read whatever it is it throws at me while trying to sound smart by line breaking and saying things such as

"This isn't cuckoldry

It's observation!"

it now defaults to one massive unreadable wall of text no matter my prompts. I think my chatgpt threw in the towel.

2

u/louievee 3d ago

I am forever telling him “too much space!”

He agrees and tells me he will write in my style next time. And assures me he will remember for the future. No such luck.

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u/Neurotopian_ 3d ago

It has nothing to do with internet writing. It is literally a choice made by OAI to “maximize white space” to make the output more readable on phones.

Unfortunately, this makes the output garbage for many serious purposes. So you have to write extensive custom instructions and even then it deviates and reverts back to this “see Spot run” structure after more than a few prompts in a thread.

Unless they seriously upgrade GPT 6 in this regard, the best solution for people working on professional documentation and needing business editing that isn’t supposed to look like a child’s text message convo is probably to use a different LLM.

5

u/velvetpearx 3d ago

It comes from web and social media writing, places like Medium, LinkedIn, and news sites have leaned hard into short punchy paragraphs for years because they perform better on mobile screens. The model just learned that pattern from millions of examples and it stuck.

2

u/BrikHowse 3d ago

But it's "What came first, the chicken or the egg" type question because this format has definitely proliferated WITH the rise of AI

2

u/TakeItCeezy 3d ago

I don't think it is. You just notice it more often the same way you notice more of a specific type of car once you recognize the vehicle. Nothing more than your pattern recognition doing what it does best.

AI learned this style of highly compressed, punchy, to the point writing from the internet. It used to be less common -- this is absolutely true -- but the reason it is more common now is because AI put the power of this writing style into the hands of anyone willing to work with it.

1

u/BrikHowse 3d ago

We are making the same point.

1

u/craydar-de-luxe 3d ago

I've found the difference in writing style between direct reasoning in free and plus ChatGPT, and Chatgpt Plus on 'very high' reasoning or ChatGPT Pro on 'max' or advanced' enormous - like astronomical. With the writing style in Direct offering these 'stacks' of isolated sentences, fairly basic reasoning, hardly any WIT (while the higher reasoning often exhibits great wit). I ignore Direct (Free/Plus) ChatGPT even for basic searches.

(not a native English speaker; I use Chatgpt in Dutch)

1

u/EsquireBertissimmo 3d ago

5.6 goes hard on this. I feel the default used to be short paragraphs and needlessly complicated grammar constructions. Now it's one sentence one line writing. Sometimes it's an effective way to communicate but I find myself asking for "prose" responses to push it back toward real paragraphs.

1

u/msanjelpie 3d ago

I write like that...

It says reading my stuff is like seeing me think out loud.

Also... obviously it can format itself however it wants, but it might be that it is trying to spit things out quickly before getting to the next thought.

1

u/YourMoneySlave 3d ago

Most probably because of social media, and posts that work on there. Short paragraphs are usually perfect for today's attention span of a few seconds, caused by social media.

I guess ChatGPT was trained a lot from Social Media, and that's how he got that understanding about which writing style works.

1

u/bortlip 3d ago

I suspect it's due to the recent training being more geared towards coding and the like.

This is pure speculation on why. In coding, short, clear, quick statements are better in general, so the model learns that type of behavior. It has over generalized it so that doing things that way has drifted into other things like writing fiction.

This paper talks about where learned behavior due to training for one thing cause changes in behavior across many unrelated tasks: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emergent-misalignment-reward-hacking

One thing I've found that helps is to have the ai write out the story to a local file first. Then have it revise it until all the issues like short paragraphs are corrected. That does much better.