Six months ago, you could spot AI-generated text by its polished grammar, rigid essay structure, suspicious fondness for em dashes – and, of course, the inevitable emoji bullets (🔥🚀✨). The real giveaway, at least to my eye and ear, isn’t the emojis or the punctuation. It’s the cadence.
AI writing has a rhythm problem. The sentences are clipped. Overly dramatic. Split into one-line paragraphs that feel more like infomercials than journalism.
“The truth? This wasn’t SEO causation. It was a stock market correction.”
“They were left behind. They were angry. They weren’t your people.”
On the page, this is nails-on-chalkboard grating. It doesn’t read as conversational. It reads as performative. In my opinion, this is, without a doubt, AI’s most recognizable stylistic fingerprint.
A Brief History Of The AI Cadence
This rhythm predates AI. It has been the language of speechwriters, preachers, and copywriters long before GPT entered the chat. Think Reagan’s addresses, Clinton’s campaign rallies, Obama’s campaign speeches, Churchill’s wartime broadcasts, and Blair’s conference speeches. Each leaned on rhythm and repetition to generate a great deal of emotion out of a speck of substance. Pair that with Captain Kirk’s famously staccato delivery, televangelists’ sermons, or TED Talks built around dramatic pauses, and you see how cadence can make small or mundane ideas feel powerful and deep.
That style used to stay in its lane. Where print valued density and clarity, speech valued brevity and rhythm. Readers could re-read; listeners could not. Editors enforced writing standards and styles and the economics of print rewarded information density over theatrics. As a result, this cadence lived solely in spoken word. It lived in speeches and sales copy, and not in essays and articles.
AI collapsed those boundaries. Because LLMs cannot (or chose to not) differentiate between a stump speech, a YouTube transcript, and a white paper, they overindex patterns designed to persuade aloud and repurpose them for the written page. Now, we are inundated with technical articles that read like motivational talks.
Why AIs Default To This Cadence
The AI cadence is not an accident – it’s a reflection of what models were most heavily trained on. Large language models have been fed a disproportionate amount of spoken-word material: transcripts of speeches, news reports, debates, interviews, webinars, podcasts, and video scripts. These aren’t “written texts” in the traditional sense; they are spoken performances converted into text.
Why so much spoken-word data? Because it’s cheap and plentiful. Back when I was running my ISP, I loved radio and TV for advertising and news mentions because it was far less expensive than buying or winning space in print. Broadcasters had 24 hours a day to fill, and local stations were always desperate for content. Print, on the other hand, is expensive. Every page of a newspaper, magazine, or book costs money to produce, and publishers limit content to what is necessary or affordable. As a result, far more hours of audio and video have been produced than carefully edited prose — and much of that material ends up transcribed. Those transcripts give the models a vast mountain of “written-down speech” compared to a relatively smaller body of curated, edited text.
The difference is subtle but important: a transcript is in a written medium, but it is not writing in a written style. It preserves the cadence of spoken delivery — short bursts, rhetorical pauses, fragments. Models overindex this rhythm because it dominates the dataset.
Even when prompted to avoid it, the models can’t resist drifting back into this rhythm. They might manage a few sentences of varied prose, but the gravitational pull of the AI cadence always drags them back. It’s now the default groove burned into their training.
The Em Dash Problem
That overindexing also explains a related AI tell: the sudden overuse of em dashes. In polished writing, dashes were historically used sparingly for emphasis or interruption. In speech, however, pauses are constant. Transcripts often mark those pauses with dashes. For a model swimming in transcripts, the dash becomes a default punctuation mark, because it functions as the written equivalent of a spoken pause. The result is copy littered with dashes – not because the ideas require them, but because the training data normalized them.
Punctuation As Breath
Punctuation has always been about more than grammar. Periods, commas, and dashes are signals for how we pause and where we breathe. They are like rests in music, telling the reader when to stop, inhale, and reset before continuing. Well-edited prose balances those pauses so the rhythm feels natural.
The AI cadence breaks this balance. When every thought is chopped into fragments, you’re effectively told to breathe after every line. Reading an article like this feels like hyperventilating: shallow breaths, constant interruptions, no sustained flow. It makes everything sound catastrophic, urgent, or world-shattering, even when the subject matter is mundane. Gentle readers, not every sentence or every idea warrants that level of drama.
Where this leaves us is that when models generate text, they parrot back the structures they’ve seen most often: speech rhythms and speech punctuation, presented as though they were the standard for written communication. They are not. They’re salesmanship with line breaks and pauses dressed up as prose.
Why Readers React To It
This cadence feels powerful at first. It mimics natural speech. It creates rhythm. It feels dramatic without requiring depth. That’s why it pops in feeds.
However, the longer it is stretched out, like in long-form content, or the more a reader is exposed to the same cadence over and over and over again, the power you once felt collapses into disdain. This breathy, short-sentence delivery leads to:
- Oversimplification which flattens nuance.
- Repetition that manipulates more than it informs.
- Every line to demand attention ensuring none of them earn it.
- Readers to suspect style is substituting for substance.
Here is the deeper problem: when everything is delivered as if it were earth-shattering, readers begin to doubt the authenticity of the message itself. It’s Syndrome’s hypothesis in The Incredibles: “When everyone is super, no one is.” If every sentence screams urgency, then nothing actually carries weight.
Historically, this kind of relentless, crisis-driven cadence has also been a manipulation tactic. Political demagogues, televangelists, and snake-oil salesmen leaned on hyperbole precisely because they lacked evidence. When AI reproduces that same rhythm on the page, it inherits the credibility problem too. Readers may not articulate it consciously, but they feel it: if you have to shout every line, maybe you don’t have enough substance to stand on quietly.
Just as keyword stuffing once became a hallmark of low-quality SEO, this cadence is already becoming the hallmark of low-quality AI. Readers recognize the rhythm before they absorb the message. When the medium distracts from the message, trust erodes.
A Tale Of Two Paragraphs
AI cadence in practice:
“The algorithm changed.
Sites lost traffic.
Panic spread.
And the industry?
It declared SEO dead – again.”
Now, the same idea written for readers:
“When the algorithm changed, many sites saw a drop in traffic. The panic was predictable. Within days, familiar headlines declared SEO dead once again. The cycle repeats every few years, and every few years it proves wrong.”
The difference here is obvious: one is an infomercial and the other is writing.
How To Spot It
Editors and readers can train themselves to notice:
- Long runs of one-sentence paragraphs.
- Rhetorical questions with no depth (often beginning with conjunctions like And or But…
- Sentence fragments pretending to be profound.
- Sermon-like pacing that seems to expect a chorus of ‘amens’ (or applause, if you’re lucky)…
Simply put, once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it: it is the literary equivalent of a laugh track.
How To Write Like A Human Again
How do we remedy this situation? Short of, I suppose, doing our own writing?
- Vary sentence length instead of defaulting to extremes.
- Use rhetorical questions sparingly – only when they genuinely add depth.
- Group related ideas into paragraphs; readers can handle more than one sentence at a time. Unless you are writing FOR toddlers, do not treat your readers as though they ARE toddlers.
- Prioritize clarity and voice over performative drama. Note here that the goal isn’t to sound casual at all costs, but to sound intentional, rational, and backed by data.
Why It Matters For SEOs And Marketers
AI writing tools are embedded in nearly every workflow. Left unchecked, they will flood the web with copy that reads like an endless sales pitch. Professionals must edit not just for facts but for voice.
That means:
- Training teams to recognize and break the AI cadence.
- Creating style guides that emphasize varied sentence and paragraph structure.
- Editing AI drafts with rhythm in mind, not just keywords.
- Writing for humans who read – not just platforms that skim.
Respecting the reader’s time and intelligence is, in the end, the real optimization.
Is There Ever A Place For This Style?
Yes, of course, but like most things, in moderation. Staccato writing is effective for:
- Ad copy where space is limited.
- Video scripts where pacing drives attention. (Your LinkedIn vertical videos and IG Reels? Have at it. This is where the staccato AI cadence shines.)
- The occasional LinkedIn post engineered for scanning.
However, should this become the default writing style for articles, blogs, or essays? Abso-effing-lutely not. It cheapens the content and undermines credibility.
In Closing
AI has introduced more than just new tools. It has also normalized certain stylistic tics that don’t belong in most forms of writing. Among these, the AI cadence problem is the most recognizable and the most damaging when left unchecked.
Writers, editors, and marketers need to treat the presence of AI cadence in their writings the same way we treated keyword stuffing a decade ago: as a major red flag. The difference between human and AI writing isn’t just factual accuracy. It’s rhythm, intent, and voice.
The real divide isn’t human versus machine. It’s generic versus intentional. Intentional writing that is structured for clarity, rooted in substance, and respectful of the reader will always stand out.
More Resources:
- Building Trust In The AI Era: Content Marketing Ethics And Transparency
- 6 Ways To Humanize Your Content In The AI Era
- Content Creation In An AI World
Featured Image: N Universe/Shutterstock
