Contraction avoidance
- Id
- contraction-avoidance
- Status
- Contested
- Severity
- low
- Detection
- statistical
- Evidence grade
- community-observed
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-15
Credible people dispute that this signals anything at all.
What it is
Not one contraction anywhere in a text that otherwise reads like speech. vale-ai-tells implements the check at document level. Wikipedia's signs-of-AI-writing page lists formal prose in itself among the indicators that do not work, and this entry cites that against itself, which is the reason it ships contested rather than active.
Why it reads as machine-made
Readers use contractions as a warmth marker, and that heuristic is the whole problem. The cues people rely on when judging how a text was made are predictable, which makes them easy to satisfy from either direction. What the rate measures is how a text was styled. A zero rate in a register that is otherwise conversational is worth a second read and nothing more.
Specimens
I am glad you asked about the pricing change. It is not something we do often, and we do not expect it to affect most customers. We will publish the details on Friday, and I will answer questions in the thread.
I'm glad you asked. The starter plan goes from 19 to 24 euros on 1 September, existing customers keep the old rate until renewal, and I'll be in the thread all Friday afternoon.
The contractions matter less than the two numbers and the date that arrived with them. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.
How it is detected
- Metric
- contractions-per-1000-words
- Threshold
- unset
- Direction
- below
- Threshold basis
- No threshold ships. No published baseline exists for contraction rate by genre, and a rate of zero is normal in academic, legal and government registers by house rule rather than by habit. Report the rate beside the register. A zero rate in text that otherwise reads as speech is a FeedSquad reading cue that sends the draft back for a pass, and it is not a measurement anyone has validated.
Who writes this way legitimately
Academic, legal and government registers forbid contractions outright, and much business English written outside the United States does the same by house style. Second-language writers often avoid them because contractions were taught as informal and risky. Wikipedia's own page lists formal prose per se among the indicators that do not work, which is the strongest argument against this entry and the reason it carries a contested status. Read the register before reading the rate, and never read the rate on its own.
Model attribution
Vendor prompts suppress several register habits release by release, and none of the published instructions we read names contractions in either direction. The rate follows the prompt and the surface more than the model family.
Platform notes
- wikipedia
- The signs-of-AI-writing page keeps a list of ineffective indicators that includes formal or fancy prose in itself, perfect grammar and bland tone. This entry sits on that list and is published contested because of it.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Contested | Ships contested. Wikipedia lists formal prose in itself among its ineffective indicators, and readers treat contractions as a warmth marker, which makes the rate a fact about styling rather than about effort. |
Sources
- 01vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rulescommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02Wikipedia: Signs of AI writingcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells