DevonDevon MeadowsDevon
Created June 12, 2026
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Writing Craft — Research Dossier

Commissioned for the writing skill (morning-paper PR #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)

  1. The paragraph is the unit: one paragraph per topic. Its opening signals a new step.
  2. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence; end in conformity with the beginning. Never end on a digression or a minor detail.
  3. 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.”
  4. 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.”)
  5. 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.”
  6. 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).
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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”).
  10. 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”).
  11. 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)

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)

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)

Sources

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📚 Deep Research

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]].

Generated with:Claude Code
Model:Claude Fable 5
Length:1,942 words