It's the actual words that matter
Dear Everyone,
Please stop using the em dash as your litmus test by which to decide a piece of writing is A.I. generated. An em dash is a perfectly normal part of writing and has been for a very long time. My publisher’s style guide utilizes em dashes. I have had to learn how to use them correctly and—hopefully—effectively. *
If you want to know if something has been written by a Large Language Model (for that is what they really are) and the author has not been kind enough to copy and paste a prompt along with their bot text, just consider a few simple tells.
Does an Instagram post use the word “highlighting”, “emphasizing”, or “contrasting” after a very banal description of the image or video, and proceeding a very didactic description of the zeitgeist of the post? It was written by an L.L.M.
Does the text appear to have a generous helping of thesaurus sprinkled on top of it? Every grade school teacher I had knew that too many “fancy” words was a dead giveaway that their student spent more time reading the thesaurus than the actual book they were writing about. You don’t have to have read a thousand theme papers to spot the difference. Is the text too perspicacious, effervescent, obsequious or even audacious? It was written by an L.L.M.
Does the text look like a word salad that bears a striking similarity to a literary meal you’ve consumed before? I have been solicited by a number of people offering promotional services for authors. Their lengthy—praise riddled—emails are peppered with words that have been used across the internet to describe my books, my writing style, and me. Even if I hadn’t carefully selected most of those words myself, the generic nature of each sentence, the hollow way in which my own words have been used, tells me that there is no genuine thought or consideration behind them. Does the text look like some kind of autotuned remix of a familiar classic? It was written by an L.L.M.
Look at the words. Consider what meaning they carry, in and of themselves, and in the way they’ve been presented to you. The human mind behind them, or lack thereof, isn’t hard to spot.
Image thanks to @schulzmuseum
* I fully embrace the irony if I haven’t used those em dashes correctly. My blog doesn’t have a line editor.
New Literary Voices
Here is a little snippet of what I discussed at the New Literary Voices event at Stanton Library in North Sydney on August 5th 2025. Hoping to chat with more audiences and field lots more interesting and engaging questions in the near future.
From the Event Bulletin:
On Tuesday 5 August Stanton Library hosted the inaugural event of their local writers’ program, New Literary Voices in North Sydney, a program developed with local writers to support local writers. It was a very successful evening, with three local writers talking about their books. Writers were Arek Sinanian who talked about his thriller Art of Deception, Rosalie Horner talked about her historical fiction book Waltzing Mathilde Letters to a little girl and Margaret M. MacDonald talked about her book Pursuing Echoes the third book in a six-part science fiction series she is writing. Forty people attended the event and really enjoyed this new format and concept. The writers did a great job which is reflected in the audience’s feedback.
“I thought it was excellent. Interesting authors with different genres made it more enjoyable and made me think. 15 minutes was the perfect amount of time + question time.”
“There was a good spread of topics, great insight into the creative process and some useful rules to follow.”
“It was excellent”
