# Anaphora abuse Part of [The AI Tells Index](https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells). A tell signals low effort. It does not identify an author. Skilled writers produce every shape listed here, some of them daily, and automated detectors misread those writers for it at rates measured above 60 percent on non-native English prose. Nothing in this index proves that a machine wrote anything. Read an entry as one piece of evidence to weigh against the false-positive notes printed beside it. ## Facts - Id: anaphora-abuse - Category: Rhetorical and discourse (rhetorical) - Subcategory: parallelism - Also known as: stacked anaphora, repeated openers for effect - Status: Contested. Credible people dispute that this signals anything at all. - Severity: low - Evidence grade: corroborated (named independently by multiple credible secondary sources) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/anaphora-abuse ## Description The same opening words on three or more successive sentences, built as parallel construction. Burton records anaphora as repetition at the beginning of successive clauses, a figure taught continuously since the Rhetorica ad Herennium. The figure is not the pattern. The pattern is the figure arriving with no argument underneath it, where the three members differ only in their last noun. Separate from the statistical opener-repetition measure, which counts function-word entropy across a document and requires no deliberate parallelism at all. ## Why it reads as machine-written Repetition reads as conviction and costs one clause to produce. Heritage and Greatbatch measured parallel three-part structures drawing applause in real political speech, so the shape demonstrably works on people, which is exactly why a preference-trained model reaches for it. That evidence also cuts the other way, and the entry ships contested because of it. Rates in ordinary edited prose have never been measured, for humans or for models. ## Detection Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written) Scope: document ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens. ```regex (?:^|[.!?]["'’)\]]?\s+)([A-Z][a-z]{1,12})\s+([a-z][a-z'’]{0,12})\b[^.!?\n]{0,120}[.!?]\s+\1\s+\2\b[^.!?\n]{0,120}[.!?]\s+\1\s+\2\b ``` Flags: gm ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > We write for the people who read every word. We write for the people who skim and come back later. We write for the people who never reply at all. It is an easy thing to say about a newsletter and a much harder thing to keep true once the list is larger than the room. After, repaired: > About one reader in five replies to something each quarter. The other four never will, so the newsletter is written to be useful without a reply. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Sermon, eulogy and stump-speech writers use anaphora as a load-bearing figure with an unbroken teaching tradition, and Heritage and Greatbatch measured parallel structures drawing applause at party conferences in 1986, decades before any of this. Children of that tradition are everywhere: closing arguments, campaign copy, liturgy, and hip-hop lyrics all repeat openers on purpose. Second-language writers taught rhetoric formally also reach for it. A reviewer checks whether the repeated members differ in more than their final noun, and whether the passage would lose an argument if the repetition were flattened. If flattening loses nothing, the figure was carrying the paragraph alone. ## Model attribution Unattributed at the family level. tropes.fyi and vale-ai-tells describe it as a general assistant habit and neither publishes a measurement. Our research pass classified any claim that one product does this more than another as folklore. ## Platform notes - linkedin: Repeated openers are a convention of the one-line-per-sentence post format on that surface, which a human growth marketer popularised in 2017. ## Sources 1. Silva Rhetoricae (Burton, BYU), anaphora https://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/A/anaphora.htm (tier: primary-doc; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. tropes.fyi pattern directory https://tropes.fyi/directory (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 4. Heritage & Greatbatch, Generating applause: a study of rhetoric and response at party political conferences, American Journal of Sociology 92(1) 1986 https://doi.org/10.1086/228465 (tier: peer-reviewed; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Contested: Opened as contested. tropes.fyi and vale-ai-tells both name stacked anaphora, but Burton records an unbroken teaching tradition and Heritage and Greatbatch measured the parallel shape winning applause in human political speech in 1986. Nobody has published a rate for either population, so the entry ships as a review trigger with the counter-evidence stated. ## License CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Attribution: The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells Reuse the data, including commercially. Keep the attribution line. --- Dataset version 1.0.0. Schema version 1. Part of [FeedSquad](https://feedsquad.com). Built by [Herman Foundry](https://hermanfoundry.com) from Levi, Finnish Lapland.