Paired-phrase coordination
- Id
- phrasal-coordination-habit
- Status
- Active
- Severity
- low
- Detection
- statistical
- Evidence grade
- peer-reviewed
- Languages
- en
- Added
- 2026-08-15
- Updated
- 2026-08-17
Currently signals low-effort writing.
What it is
Nouns and adjectives arrive in pairs where one member would carry the whole meaning. Reinhart and colleagues measure phrasal coordination at 1.9 times the human rate in GPT-4o output, with a Cohen's d of 0.81, again a body-level table value. Pairs are two members. The three-member version belongs to the rule-of-three entry, and the two patterns do not overlap.
Why it reads as machine-made
A pair looks like care and costs nothing to produce. The second member is usually a near-synonym of the first, so the sentence lengthens without becoming more exact. Read a paragraph back and count how many pairs survive the deletion of one member with no loss of meaning. In most low-effort drafts the answer is none.
Specimens
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Seven pairs went out and one checkable behaviour came in. Delete the second member of every pair and the passage says exactly what it said before, which is nothing that could be tested against the product.
How it is detected
- Metric
- coordinated-noun-or-adjective-pairs-per-1000-words
- Threshold
- unset
- Direction
- above
- Threshold basis
- No threshold ships. The 1.9 times ratio is a body-level comparison between corpora, and legal and ceremonial registers sit far above any line that could be drawn from it. The count is a FeedSquad review trigger for a reread, not a measurement with a published human baseline behind it.
Who writes this way legitimately
Legal drafting runs on doublets, and aid and abet, terms and conditions, null and void are fixed pairs that a lawyer cannot unpick without changing what the clause does. Liturgy, ceremonial writing and older English pair by convention. The check is deletion: remove one member and see whether any meaning goes with it. If meaning is lost, the writer is using a term of art. If nothing is lost, the pair is decoration, and a page full of decoration is the signal.
Model attribution
Measured in GPT-4o output. No vendor documentation names the habit, and no study attributes it to a specific model family.
Status history
| Date | Status | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-15 | Active | Measured at 1.9 times the human rate in 2024-era model output and carried by vale-ai-tells as a checkable rule. No published work reports the habit fading. |
Sources
- 01Reinhart et al., Do LLMs write like humans? PNAS 122(8) (arXiv:2410.16107)peer-reviewedaccessed 2026-08-14
- 02vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rulescommunityaccessed 2026-08-14
CC BY 4.0 / The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells