---
title: "Writing Craft — Research Dossier"
summaryNote: "research-writing-craft"
created: "2026-06-12"
wordCount: 1942
model: "Claude Fable 5"
aiSource: "Claude Code"
context: "Part of [[My Working Notes]]. Commissioned for the writing skill in [[Morning Paper]]: Strunk's complete rule set, what AI copy smells like now, and what makes prose worth reading every day. The craft behind [[Titles are takeaways, not labels]]."
summary: "Strunk still holds, and what gives AI prose away now is structure rather than vocabulary — uniform sentence length above everything else. What keeps writing worth reading daily is variety in the music of it, one genuine surprise, and an ending that launches instead of recapping."
---

# Writing Craft — Research Dossier

Commissioned for the writing skill ([morning-paper PR #20](https://github.com/dmthepm/morning-paper/pull/20)).
Three questions: what are the complete elements of style; what does AI copy
smell like right now; what makes prose worth reading daily. Sources at the end.

## 1. Strunk, the actual rules (1918 text, Project Gutenberg #37134)

### Elementary rules of usage (1–7)

1. Possessive singular: add 's whatever the final consonant (Charles's).
2. Serial comma: in a series of three or more, comma after each term but
   the last (red, white, and blue).
3. Parenthetic expressions take commas on both sides or neither. Never one.
4. Comma before a conjunction introducing a co-ordinate clause.
5. Independent clauses joined without a conjunction take a semicolon, not a
   comma — also when the second clause opens with *therefore*, *then*,
   *thus*.
6. Don't break sentences in two (periods for commas). Emphatic fragments
   are allowed only when the emphasis is unmistakably deliberate: "Again
   and again he called out. No reply."
7. An opening participial phrase must refer to the grammatical subject.
   "Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very
   cheap" is about a dilapidated buyer.

### Elementary principles of composition (8–18)

8. The paragraph is the unit: one paragraph per topic. Its opening signals
   a new step.
9. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end in conformity with the
   beginning. Never end on a digression or a minor detail.
10. **Active voice.** "A survey of this region was made in 1900" → "This
    region was surveyed in 1900." Passive is right only when the
    acted-upon is the topic. Watch the noun-swallows-verb fault:
    "Mobilization of the army was rapidly effected" → "The army was
    rapidly mobilized."
11. **Positive form.** "Did not pay any attention to" → "ignored"; "not
    honest" → "dishonest." *Not* is for denial and antithesis, never
    evasion. The reader wants told what is. (True antithesis is strong:
    "Not charity, but simple justice.")
12. **Definite, specific, concrete.** "A period of unfavorable weather set
    in" → "It rained every day for a week." Strunk: "the surest method of
    arousing and holding the attention of the reader is by being specific,
    definite, and concrete." Spencer's worked pair: "In proportion as the
    manners ... are cruel and barbarous, the regulations of their penal
    code will be severe" → "In proportion as men delight in battles,
    bull-fights, and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging,
    burning, and the rack."
13. **Omit needless words.** "A sentence should contain no unnecessary
    words ... for the same reason that a drawing should have no
    unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." Not a
    short-sentence rule — "make every word tell." Stock kills: *the
    question as to whether*, *there is no doubt but that*, *used for fuel
    purposes*, *he is a man who*, *in a hasty manner*, *the fact that*
    (revise out of every sentence), *who is / which was* before
    appositives. Also: don't dribble one complex idea across a series of
    short sentences; combine (his Macbeth example: 51 words → 26).
14. **Avoid a succession of loose sentences** — two co-ordinate clauses
    joined by a conjunction or relative, repeated until the page goes
    "mechanical symmetry and sing-song." The cure is variety: simple
    sentences, semicolon pairs, periodic sentences.
15. **Parallel ideas, parallel form.** "My objections are, first, that the
    measure is unjust; second, that it is unconstitutional." Repeat the
    article/preposition across a whole series or only before the first.
16. **Keep related words together.** Subject beside principal verb; the
    relative pronoun immediately after its antecedent; modifiers next to
    what they modify ("He only found two mistakes" → "He found only two
    mistakes").
17. **One tense in summaries** — and signpost once: indicate at the outset
    that what follows is summary, "and then waste no words in repeating
    the notification" (no intercalated "he said," "the paper notes").
18. **Emphatic words at the end.** The end of the sentence is the position
    of prominence; the new element goes there. The same principle governs
    the sentences of a paragraph and the paragraphs of a composition. The
    beginning is the second-strongest position.

### Chapter V keepers (words and expressions, the ones an editor agent uses)

- *Very*, *certainly*, *so* (intensifier): use words that carry their own
  emphasis instead.
- *Interesting* "as a perfunctory means of introduction" — show the thing.
- *The fact that*: always revisable out. *As to whether* → whether.
- *Factor*, *feature*, *case*, *character*, *nature*, *system*,
  *along these lines*: abstraction filler; the sentence improves when the
  word disappears ("acts of a hostile character" → "hostile acts").
- *One of the most ...*: never open with it. *Worth while*: vague approval.
- *Claim* ≠ declare/maintain. *Literally* never props exaggeration.
  *Less* ≠ fewer. *Like* ≠ as. *While* ≠ and/but. *Due to* ≠ because of.
- *He is a man who*: see rule 13.

## 2. AI tells, current (June 2026)

### The era shift

The 2023–24 vocabulary tells (*delve*, *tapestry*, *testament*,
*boasts*, *vibrant*) are mostly trained out of current frontier models;
Wikipedia's signs-of-AI-writing project now tracks them as a historical
band. What survives across model generations is **structural**: rhythm,
reflex constructions, and shape. GPT-5.1 now suppresses em-dashes by
default; Claude and Gemini still lean on them — so punctuation tells have
become model-specific while structure tells stay universal.

### Fable 5 specifically (launched June 9; three days of coverage)

- Noren's writer-focused review: without a voice profile Fable 5 writes
  "fluent and well-organized, with Anthropic's characteristic phrasing,
  tidy paragraph shapes, and editorial polish" — better *generic* prose,
  not anyone's prose. Their head-to-head test: a voice profile moved
  output more than the model upgrade did; "Sonnet 4.6 with a well-built
  voice profile produces a draft that sounds more like a specific writer
  than Fable 5 without one." Fable's raw line-level instincts are sharper
  ("The hands have a moat that the keyboard never did"), and cold-prompted
  it converges on the same probable openings as Sonnet ("For most of the
  last fifty years, the formula for a good life was simple").
- Willison (5.5 hours in): capability and proactivity notes, not prose
  notes — "relentlessly proactive" is the behavioral tell.
- Implication for this newsroom: the model upgrade does not solve voice;
  the revision pass and `preferences/voice.md` do.

### The five deadliest current tells (ranked, with evidence)

1. **Uniform cadence.** Sentences clustered at 18–24 words, one after
   another — low burstiness. Duey's detection write-up calls it "the
   single biggest AI tell in 2026 ... the pattern that survives longest
   across prompt rewrites"; their threshold: "if three or more in a row
   land between 17 and 23 words, same conclusion."
2. **The unearned antithesis.** "Not just X, but Y" / "It's not X, it's
   Y." Wikipedia files it under negative parallelism; Duey's line:
   humans write one occasionally, "LLMs write one per paragraph" — "the
   sound of a model reaching for emphasis it hasn't earned."
3. **Significance inflation + the copulative dodge.** "Stands as a
   testament," "pivotal role," "underscores," "marks a key turning point,"
   "evolving landscape"; *serves as / stands as / boasts* where *is*
   belongs. Wikipedia's top content pattern (undue emphasis on
   significance) plus its avoidance-of-copulatives entry.
4. **The tidy triplet.** Rule-of-three as rhythm filler ("fast, reliable,
   and affordable"). Flagged independently by Wikipedia, Duey, and vrid's
   27-red-flags list; the giveaway is matched beats with no factual reason
   there are three.
5. **The summary-conclusion compulsion.** Boilerplate closers ("As AI
   continues to evolve, one thing is clear"), "In conclusion" recaps, and
   the outline formula "Despite its [positives], [subject] faces
   challenges..." with a Future Outlook section.

### The rest of the kill list

Hedging clusters ("it's worth noting," "generally speaking," "arguably,"
"in many cases"); sycophantic / throat-clearing openers ("Great
question," "Let's dive in"); the participial analysis clause (",
highlighting the importance of...") — Wikipedia's "superficial analysis"
pattern, judgment with no evidence attached; the colon-subtitle headline
reflex plus title-case headings; em-dash chains (still a Claude lean);
abstraction where a detail exists (vrid's example: "unique mix of smells"
vs "burnt espresso and old books"); symmetrical list items and identical
paragraph arcs; low information density (vrid's "treadmill effect": a
500-word section carrying 100 words of information); "from X to Y"
constructions; Latinate bias (*utilize*, *commence*).

Caveat the sources themselves carry: none of these is proof alone; humans
write triplets and dashes too. The signal is density and co-occurrence.

## 3. What makes prose worth reading (beyond brevity)

- **Zinsser (On Writing Well):** simplicity plus humanity. Writing is a
  transaction — one writer talking to one reader; warmth and aliveness
  beat polish. The lead "must capture the reader immediately ... cajole
  him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor, or surprise."
  Surprise is "the most refreshing element in nonfiction." Collect more
  material than you use; strength is proportional to the surplus of detail
  you can choose from. And the ending: when you're ready to stop, stop —
  the last sentence should be a launching pad, not a recap.
- **Provost (100 Ways to Improve Your Writing):** the "This sentence has
  five words" passage — sentence length is music. All-short is a
  monotonous engine; the writer varies length so the page has "rhythm, a
  lilt, a harmony," saving the long crescendo sentence for material that
  earned it. This is the direct antidote to tell #1.
- **McPhee (Draft No. 4):** structure is the invisible attractor — it
  "should move the narrative without drawing unnecessary attention to
  itself." He distrusts the formulaic nut graf as "rote methodology," but
  the journalistic function stands: early on, the reader learns why this
  matters and why now — by being shown, not by a labeled paragraph. Ledes
  are the hardest part and worth the agony.
- **Journalism craft:** the nut graf's job (what, why it matters, why
  today) belongs in the first two sentences of a section; concrete detail
  over abstraction; specificity *is* credibility — the verified odd fact
  ("owner@example-roofing.com, a roofing-company domain") persuades where an
  adjective ("a strong signal") merely asserts.
- **For a daily operator paper:** the format is the constant; the judgment
  is the news. Standing furniture (strip, queue, telemetry) earns trust by
  being identical every day and earns reading by saying something new
  inside. What deadens a daily: items repeated verbatim, the same sentence
  shapes carrying different facts, ritual phrases ("the paper notes"),
  conclusions that recap. What keeps it alive: one genuine surprise per
  edition, stale items compressed to a flagged line, sections that end on
  the newest fact or the reader's move, and prose that could only have
  been written today.

## Sources

- Strunk, *The Elements of Style* (1918/1920): [Project Gutenberg #37134](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134) (full text fetched and extracted)
- [Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing) — the maintained catalog; content patterns, vocabulary bands by era, negative parallelism, rule of three, formatting tells
- [Duey — The Em-Dash Myth: What Actually Gives Away AI Writing](https://www.duey.ai/post/em-dash-ai-writing) — cadence uniformity as the #1 2026 tell; thresholds; construction list
- [vrid — Signs of AI Writing: 27 Red Flags](https://vrid.ai/blog/signs-of-ai-writing) — hedging, abstraction trap, treadmill effect, first-word fingerprints by model
- [Noren — Claude Fable 5 Review: What Writers Need to Know](https://usenoren.ai/blog/claude-fable-5-review) and [Fable vs Sonnet vs Opus writing test](https://usenoren.ai/blog/claude-fable-5-writing-test) — default-voice findings, profile-beats-model result
- [Simon Willison — Initial impressions of Claude Fable 5](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/9/claude-fable-5/) (June 9, 2026)
- [Lenny's Newsletter — Claude Fable 5 review](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/claude-fable-5-review-what-the-new) (capability-focused; prose analysis thin)
- [Plagiarism Today — Em Dashes, Hyphens and Spotting AI Writing](https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2025/06/26/em-dashes-hyphens-and-spotting-ai-writing/); [Front Edge Publishing — em-dash myth-busting](https://frontedgepublishing.com/busting-the-myth-that-em-dashes-are-a-sure-sign-of-an-ai-text/)
- Zinsser, *On Writing Well* — via collected notes ([Graham Mann](https://grahammann.net/book-notes/on-writing-well-william-zinsser), [Nat Eliason](https://www.nateliason.com/notes/writing-well-william-zinsser))
- [Gary Provost — "This Sentence Has Five Words" (Aerogramme Studio)](https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2014/08/05/this-sentence-has-five-words/)
- McPhee, *Draft No. 4* — via [Nieman Storyboard](https://niemanstoryboard.org/2017/12/21/draft-no-4-the-legendary-john-mcphees-master-class-in-the-writers-craft/) and [the original New Yorker essay](https://jsomers.net/mcphee-draft-no-4.pdf)
- [Nut graph — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_graph); [Michelle Rafter — Back to basics: the nut graph](https://michellerafter.com/2013/08/15/back-to-basics-the-nut-graph/)