# Broetry cadence 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: broetry-cadence - Category: Platform-specific (platform) - Subcategory: post-shape - Also known as: one sentence per line, white-space stack post - Status: Contested. Credible people dispute that this signals anything at all. - Severity: medium - Evidence grade: community-observed (named by practitioners, no formal measurement exists) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-15 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/broetry-cadence ## Description One sentence per line, blank line between, held for a whole post. BuzzFeed News named the format broetry in December 2017 and traced its conventions to a marketer teaching them as a growth formula: a personal story, no outbound links, a tag at the end. Line breaks are a layout decision, so the shape carries no information about who typed the words. What it does say is that a formula was in the room before the content was. ## Why it reads as machine-written Ask an assistant for a LinkedIn post and this layout arrives before any material does, because the corpus it learned from is saturated with the format. The lines are then often short enough to hold nothing. Read the lines instead of the spacing. A stacked post carrying dates, figures and named people is just a stacked post. ## 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 (?:^[A-Za-z][^\n.!?]{5,110}[.!?]\r?\n\r?\n){3} ``` Flags: gm ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > I almost turned down the meeting. > > My calendar was already full that week. > > Something told me to take it anyway. > > That call changed how I think about pipeline. > > Lesson: take the meeting. After, repaired: > I nearly skipped a 30 minute call with a systems integrator in March 2025 because the week was full. They became our second largest reseller by December and now account for about a fifth of new seats. Worth taking because their customers already ran the platform we plug into, which I did not know before I sat down. Note: The repair keeps the anecdote and adds the things that make it checkable: a date, a role, a size. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Human growth marketers on LinkedIn built this format in 2017 and sold it as a course, so a stacked post is first evidence that somebody took the course. Poets break lines this way. So do people typing on phones, and anyone writing around the truncated preview the feed shows before a reader taps to expand. The reviewer check is whether any single line carries a fact that could turn out to be wrong. ## Model attribution No family attribution. Assistants reproduce the layout on request for a LinkedIn post because the training corpus is full of it, and no vendor documents the tendency in a model card or system prompt. ## Platform notes - linkedin: LinkedIn has published nothing about line breaks. Its May 2022 feed post addresses explicit reaction requests and poll volume, and its March 2026 newsroom post defines automated comments and engagement pods. Neither names a writing style. Claims that LinkedIn demotes particular formatting circulate widely in marketing blogs and trace back to no LinkedIn document. ## Sources 1. BuzzFeed News, why are these posts taking over your LinkedIn feed https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-posts-taking-over-your-linkedin-feed-because (tier: press; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Contested: The format is a documented human invention from 2017, taught in paid courses five years before an assistant could imitate it, and no LinkedIn policy has ever addressed line breaks. Contested is the honest shipping status: the shape is real and worth naming, its signal value is close to zero. ## 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.