# Instructed reread

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: instructed-reread
- Category: Rhetorical and discourse (rhetorical)
- Subcategory: emphasis-instruction
- Also known as: Read that again, Let that sink in, read that twice
- Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing.
- Severity: low
- Evidence grade: feedsquad-observed (our own corpus only, no external attestation)
- Languages: en
- Added: 2026-10-06
- Updated: 2026-10-06
- Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/instructed-reread

## Description

A line that tells the reader to reread the sentence before it, or to pause on it. The two stock forms are read that again and let that sink in. The instruction follows a claim the writer wants treated as weighty. It adds no information of its own.

## Why it reads as machine-written

The line asks the reader to feel a weight that the sentence before it did not create. The phrase spread through LinkedIn and X growth advice before writing assistants existed. Assistant drafts written in that register reproduce it. Readers who have met it many times discount the claim it points at.

## Detection

Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written)

Scope: sentence

ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens.

```regex
\b(?:read\s+that\s+(?:again|twice)|let\s+that\s+sink\s+in)\b
```

Flags: gi

## Examples

Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts.

### Specimen 1

Before, exhibiting the tell:

> We stopped sending a weekly newsletter and our inbound doubled.
>
> Read that again.

After, repaired:

> We stopped sending a weekly newsletter in March. Inbound demo requests went from about 20 a month to about 40, and most of the new ones mentioned a long post rather than an email.

Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.

### Specimen 2

Before, exhibiting the tell:

> Your customers do not care about your roadmap. Let that sink in.

After, repaired:

> Three of the five customers we interviewed in June had never opened the roadmap page. Two asked when the export bug would be fixed, and the roadmap did not mention it.

Note: Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen.

## False positives

Who legitimately writes this way.

Teachers and editors say read that again when a sentence really does reward a second pass, such as a contract clause or a tricky definition. Memoir and fiction use let that sink in inside dialogue. Speakers use both on stage, where a pause is a real device. The tell is the instruction placed after a social post's own aphorism, where the sentence it points at carries no fact that a second reading would find.

## Model attribution

No family attribution. FeedSquad has not measured the phrase by model, and no vendor documents suppressing it.

## Sources

1. FeedSquad banned-pattern registry, rule read_that_twice (FeedSquad observation)
   Corpus: The read_that_twice rule in FeedSquad's lint_patterns registry, seeded on 2026-06-10 and applied to agent drafts at every scheduling transition since. The registry records the rule and its rationale. No prevalence count was kept, so this is an editorial judgement rather than a measurement.
   Observed 2026-06-10

## Status history

Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page.

- 2026-10-06, Active: Opened as active with low severity. The phrase has been on FeedSquad's banned-pattern registry since June 2026. No external measurement of it exists, so the grade is our own observation.

## 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.

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Dataset version 1.2.0. Schema version 1.
Part of [FeedSquad](https://feedsquad.com). Built by [Herman Foundry](https://hermanfoundry.com) from Levi, Finnish Lapland.