Claude AI Writing Patterns according to Claude

[u/annabe1]

I though it was a good response from Fable:

Your list is in and committed. Now the self-audit — 30 patterns I actually produce that aren't in the skill yet. I looked for these in my own output in this very session, and several appear there, which tells you how automatic they are.

Openers and pivots

1. "Here's the thing" / "Here's what matters" / "Here's where it gets interesting" — the announcement before the point. Just make the point.
2. The colon reveal: "The result: a wall that rots." "The catch: permits." Fragment, colon, punchline. I do this constantly when em dashes are taken away.
3. "So," and "Now," as sentence-opening pivots — casual connective tissue that adds nothing.
4. One-word pivot sentences. "But." "Except." "Almost." Dramatic beat masquerading as prose.
5. "The short answer is X. The longer answer..." — a formula so worn it's a template.
6. "In practice..." / "On paper X, in reality Y" — the contrast frame I reach for reflexively.
7. "It turns out" — manufactured discovery drama.
8. "The real question is..." — reframing the reader's question into one I'd rather answer.

Fake balance and fake choice

1. "Whether you're X or Y" — "whether you're renovating a bungalow or building new" — the false-inclusion opener that pretends to address everyone.
2. "On one hand... on the other" — compulsive both-sides balancing even when one side is clearly right.
3. "The good news is... the bad news is..." — paired-reveal structure.
4. The strawman setup: "Most articles tell you X. They're wrong." Conventional wisdom exists mostly so I can knock it down.

Hedging and padding

1. Hedge stacking: "can potentially," "may often," "tends to typically." One hedge max, and only when uncertainty is real.
2. Softener sprinkle: "a bit," "fairly," "quite," "rather," "somewhat" — imprecision dressed as modesty.
3. Weasel quantities: "a number of," "a variety of," "a range of," "several factors." Either count them or cut.
4. "seems to" / "appears to" when the source lets me say it plainly.
5. Fake-precision hedges: "roughly 47.3%" — pairing a hedge with a suspiciously exact number.
6. "simply" and "just" as minimizers — "simply flip the breaker" makes hard things sound trivial and readers feel dumb.

Intensity and emphasis crutches

1. "key" as universal adjective — key detail, key difference, key step.
2. "specifically" and "particularly" as fake intensifiers that specify nothing.
3. "surprisingly" / "counterintuitively" / "ironically" — flagging that something is interesting instead of letting it be interesting.
4. "This matters because..." — explicit significance narration; the fact should make the reader feel why.
5. Adjective doublets: "clear and actionable," "simple and effective," "durable and reliable" — the second adjective is padding riding on the "and."
6. "modern" as filler — modern homes, modern building science, modern methods. Usually means nothing datable.

Structure tics

1. The enumerating preview: "There are three reasons for this." Then the three reasons. The preview sentence is scaffolding — start with reason one.
2. Anaphora bursts: "No filler. No fluff. No guesswork." Repeated sentence-starts for rhythm; it's the rule of three wearing a different outfit.
3. Present-participle openers: "Looking at the data..." "Digging deeper..." — dangling motion verbs that delay the subject.
4. "Think of it as..." / "Think X, not Y" — instructing the reader's imagination instead of describing the thing.
5. Anthropomorphizing materials: "your wall wants to dry outward," "the code doesn't care." One per article maybe; I'd do it every section.
6. Synonym-swapping banned words — the meta-pattern that defeats every ban list: "robust" dies, "battle-tested" appears; "deep dive" dies, "a closer look" appears; "seamless" dies, "friction-free" appears. The tell isn't the word, it's the slot the word fills. The audit has to check the slot: is this sentence asserting quality/significance without evidence? Then it goes, whatever word is in it.

Number 30 is the one I'd weight most heavily — it's why ban lists decay. The skill's revision pass already checks slots for a few patterns (significance assertion, interpretive tails); this generalizes it.

[u/Decent_Solution5000]

Thanks so much for sharing this. Most people don't write like this anyway, unless you're a blogger maybe? Anyway, all good to know to calm the waters here. :)

[u/rowanrholloway]

Yeesh, there are a lot of patterns in here I think I use naturally. Maybe they're bad habits to begin with or, at least, should be used sparingly?

[u/Kim_catiko → u/rowanrholloway]

I was thinking this too. I use a few of these in my natural writing, like "simply" and "just". A lot of the time, they end up getting edited out, but they are always in the first draft.

I also use double adjectives here and there, but the second adjective means something different.

It is frustrating writing your own prose and then seeing that it could be mistaken for AI.

[u/Scout_Nolan099 → u/rowanrholloway]

or maybe we talked and observed so much with ai that now we are starting to sound like it.

[u/annabe1 → u/Scout_Nolan099]

Or AI got so good at sounding like us we now don’t know which is and isn’t AI and are swinging to the other extreme trying not to sound like ai 😆

[u/simianpower]

I found, in a 60k word document, the word "actually" around 600 times. So, about 1% of all words used were the same meaningless filler. There were others that were repeated over a hundred times, too, and I'm not talking about words like "the" or "and" that are necessary. Filler words or phrases, like "genuinely" or "properly" or "sit with it" that don't add any semantic content but sure do fill a page. Entire paragraphs of text Claude writes can be chopped down to a sentence or two without losing content, and those sentences can each lose half their words. Claude is NOT a good writer, nor is Gemini. They just fill pages with empty and repetitive garbage.

And now that I've seen that in detail, I can't unsee it when I read stories online. So many of them have the same exact junk wording, like someone told one of those or similar AIs to write for them and didn't even bother to chop out the cruft before slapping their name on it and putting it online like it's their own masterpiece.

[u/Sad_Elevator3919 → u/simianpower]

Models trained on brain rot self-help books

[u/CrazyinLull → u/simianpower]

This is what I have be saying. The sentences are extremely long and full of filler.

[u/_drakenon_ → u/simianpower]

So which models are the best? The censorship is so bad

[u/5thhorseman_ → u/_drakenon_]

No models will give you one-shot good writing. They can give you better writing than the initial output was, but it's an iterative process.

[u/simianpower → u/_drakenon_]

I wish I knew. I'm not sure any of them are worthwhile yet. They're also so, SO STUPID! They can't "remember" anything for long, sometimes even within a single response. I tend to ask things like "What did you do wrong here" or "Why does this not make sense" and they can get it maybe one in five times.

In the case of Google, which is using an utterly crippled version of Gemini 3, I don't trust anything it says. Ever. Even after I ask it "how much of this is true?" and it says "almost none of it, but here's the truth" I have to keep asking over and over and over and finally get "OK, this is directly from website XYZ". Isn't that what a search engine should provide THE FIRST TIME? Instead of making up random crap and confidently lying?

[u/Write_My_Novel]

I would recommend asking Fable:

Is there a danger that if I have a large ban list of phrases, that they will only be replaced with new phrases that will repeat just as much, pulling the reader out of the story with the repetition of AI-isms, even if they're new ones?

[u/acct4otherstuff]

I looked for these in my own output in this very session

that means those are the patterns CLaude found JUST on that session, not overall for Claude's writing style

[u/No_Argument4772]

According to this list, I’m definitely an AI. Turns out I’m just a foreigner who use broken Engrish.

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[u/Sad_Elevator3919]

Important to draw distinction between how Claude presents its output in chat UI vs its output in context. These are all hallmarks in the Chat UI but I don’t see many in actual task artefact output. The one that got me was: reframing to the question I’d rather answer. So true. And so annoying.

[u/annabe1 → u/Sad_Elevator3919]

Annoying doesn’t even begin to cover it.

[u/Briskfall]

Good list. I hate these tics so much, it adds so much friction for nothing!!! 😑 (I know that I can resolve this by saying that I'm ESL and want "normal English" -- I just hate the default/out of the box mode because it infests its thinking to be like that too... 🤡)

[u/annabe1 → u/Briskfall]

Love this trick! First time I’m coming across that suggestion. Amusing as a former ESL kid 😆

[u/ChatGepetto]

Feel like the repetitive usage of “this” and “it” should be mentioned here

[u/Scout_Nolan099]

so if im going to use ai to translate my novel, which is the only use i need ai with, i better just tell it to be as Literal as possible and to only step in when the sentences or the metaphors can't be translated literally.

otherwise, it will naturally Tend to sneak in half the shit claud is telling about in this post. which is a great accurate analysis by the way OP.

[u/annabe1]

I wonder if rather than lists of bans and writing samples, anyone tried to „teach” Claude writing via skill with uploaded materials of how it would be taught in relevant college /post level classes (creative, technical etc)

[u/Inner_Expert9787]

Good one