# Formal transition crutch 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: formal-transition-crutch - Category: Lexical (lexical) - Subcategory: transition-words - Also known as: additionally, furthermore, moreover, consequently, nonetheless, thereby, accordingly, subsequently, connective stacking, AFL connectives - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: medium - 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/formal-transition-crutch ## Description Formal connectives used as the joint itself. Additionally, furthermore, moreover and consequently announce a logical relation between two sentences that were going to sit next to each other anyway. The taxonomy harvest behind this index normalised 13 independent public lists of AI writing markers. Three items were named by 11 of the 13: additionally, delve and underscore. The detection here counts sentence-initial connectives per 1,000 words rather than banning any of them, because each one has a real job in English and one occurrence carries almost no information. ## Why it reads as machine-written A model producing text one sentence at a time has a strong pull toward marking the seam. The connective arrives before the relation exists, so the reader is told that a consequence follows and then reads a restatement. Dense academic prose stacks connectives too. That is why this is a density measure, and a weak one. ## Detection Type: statistical (a measured metric against a threshold with a stated basis) Metric: formal-connective-sentence-openers-per-1000-words Threshold: 6 (fires when above) Threshold basis: > No published per-document cutoff exists for connective density. Kobak and colleagues measure excess vocabulary across 15 million abstracts at corpus scale, and Juzek and Ward test where the overrepresentation comes from; neither publishes a document-level line, because both methods are population-level by design. Six sentence-initial formal connectives per 1,000 words is a FeedSquad review trigger, set high enough that one well-signposted academic paragraph does not fire on its own. Recalibrate against a measured corpus of the genre under review before treating the number as anything but a prompt to read the text. ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > Additionally, the onboarding flow was updated. Furthermore, the copy was revised for clarity, and the revision was reviewed internally before anything went out. Consequently, users are now better supported throughout the signup process. Moreover, the change reflects a broader commitment to clarity that the organisation has been working toward for some time. Additionally, feedback gathered during the review has been logged and will inform the next phase of work. Subsequently, the same approach will be applied elsewhere. After, repaired: > We cut onboarding from six screens to three on 4 June. The two screens we dropped asked for company size and job title, and nothing in the product ever read either field. Signups now finish about a minute faster. Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. The repair works by naming what changed and when. Deleting the connectives on their own would have left the same empty sentences behind. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. This is taught vocabulary. The Academic Word List and the Academic Formulas List put these connectives in front of every student who has taken a course in English for academic purposes, and second-language writers produce them at higher rates than native speakers because that is what the instruction rewards. Legal drafting and standards documents use thereby and accordingly as terms of the trade. Technical specifications signpost on purpose, because a reader who skips a clause has to be able to find the thread again. A reviewer should read what sits between the connectives rather than counting them: honest signposting joins two different claims, and the crutch version joins a claim to its own paraphrase. Wikipedia lists transition words in isolation among its ineffective indicators, which is the same finding from the other direction. ## Model attribution No family attribution. The connectives appear across the public list corpus without a vendor named, and Kobak measures the vocabulary at corpus scale in biomedical abstracts rather than per model. ## Platform notes - wikipedia: Editors list transition words in isolation under ineffective indicators, and require corroboration from a non-pop-science source before any word joins the maintained list. - google: Google rates content on effort, originality and added value rather than on tooling. Connective density is invisible to that question, which is the right way round. ## Sources 1. Kobak et al., Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications, Science Advances 11(27) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813 (tier: peer-reviewed; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. Juzek and Ward, Why Does ChatGPT Delve So Much? COLING 2025 (arXiv:2412.11385) https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11385 (tier: peer-reviewed; accessed 2026-08-14) 3. Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 4. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 5. Geng and Trotta, coevolution of human and LLM writing, Findings of ACL 2025 https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.657/ (tier: peer-reviewed; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Wikipedia keeps the formal connectives in its current list, vale-ai-tells ships machine-checkable rules for them, and additionally is one of the three items named by 11 of the 13 independent lists we normalised. Geng and Trotta show publicised markers decaying faster than unpublicised ones, so this entry should be expected to move. ## 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.