Emphatic adverbs
- Id
- emphatic-adverb-tic
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- medium
- Detection
- deterministic
- Evidence grade
- primary-doc
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-17
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
Intensifying adverbs that add emphasis and no content. What lifts this entry above list folklore is first-party documentation: Anthropic publishes its product system prompts with dates, and the Claude Opus 5 prompt of 2026-07-24 instructs the model to avoid saying genuinely, honestly and straightforward, with the 4.8 prompt of 2026-05-28 naming genuinely, honestly and actually. A vendor writing a suppression instruction is documenting the tendency it is suppressing, which is dated evidence about a default pull rather than about what the shipped product emits.
Why it reads as machine-made
The adverb performs sincerity in a sentence that has not earned any. It is also load-bearing for nothing: remove it and the claim is unchanged, which is the test.
Specimens
This is truly remarkable work. Simply put: nobody else is doing it, and the care behind it is genuinely rare in a category this crowded.
We tried five other tools in July and none of them let you approve a week of posts from one screen. If we missed one, tell us and we will correct this page.
The repair replaces the intensifier with the count, the month, and an invitation to be shown wrong.
How it is detected
- Pattern
- \b(?:truly|genuinely)\s+(?:remarkable|exciting|special|impressive|unique|humbled|grateful)\b|\bsimply\s+put\s*[,:]
- Flags
- gi
- Scope
- sentence
Who writes this way legitimately
Conversational essayists, newsletter writers and anyone putting speech on the page use these adverbs naturally, because spoken English is full of them and a transcript that removes them stops sounding like a person. Straightforward is plain English and is often the most accurate word available, which is why this pattern does not match it at all despite the vendor instruction naming it. Sincerity markers also do real work in apologies and in bad news, where a flat register reads as indifference. The pattern requires an intensifier plus a specific evaluative adjective for that reason. A reviewer should apply the deletion test: if the sentence means exactly the same thing without the adverb, the adverb was decoration, and if it does not, leave it alone.
Model attribution
Anthropic names genuinely, honestly and actually in the Claude Opus 4.8 system prompt dated 2026-05-28, and genuinely, honestly and straightforward in the Claude Opus 5 prompt dated 2026-07-24. That is evidence about a default pull the vendor is correcting, and it says nothing about what any other family does.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Active, and unusually well evidenced for a word-level entry. Anthropic dated the suppression instruction across three model releases between May and July 2026, which places the tendency in current systems by the vendor own account. The pattern is nonetheless narrow, because the words themselves are ordinary English. |
Sources
- 01Anthropic dated system prompts, release notesvendoraccessed 2026-08-14
- 02vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rulescommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
- 03Wikipedia: Signs of AI writingcommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells