Ai Writing Tropes
Detect and eliminate common AI writing tropes from prose. Use when drafting, editing, or reviewing text to avoid the predictable patterns that mark AI-generated writing.
Install
$ agentstack add skill-joshuadavidthomas-agent-skills-ai-writing-tropes ✓ scanned · ✓ verified, works with Claude Code, Cursor, and more.
Security review
✓ PassedNo issues found. Passed automated security review. · v0.1.0 How review works →
- ✓ Prompt-injection patterns
- ✓ Secret / credential exfiltration
- ✓ Dangerous shell & filesystem operations
- ✓ Untrusted network calls
- ✓ Known-malicious package signatures
What it can access
- ✓ Network access No
- ✓ Filesystem access No
- ✓ Shell / process execution No
- ✓ Environment & secrets No
- ✓ Dynamic code execution No
From automated source analysis of v0.1.0. “Used” means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it’s unsafe.
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Links to your public security report.[](https://agentstack.voostack.com/security/report/skill-joshuadavidthomas-agent-skills-ai-writing-tropes) Reliability & compatibility
Declared compatibility
Compatibility is declared by the source manifest. End-to-end runtime verification is coming, see below.
We're building live execution health for every listing: tool-call success rate, median latency, uptime, and last-checked timestamps, measured, not self-reported. It isn't live yet, so we don't show numbers we can't stand behind.
How agent discovery & health will work →About
AI Writing Tropes to Avoid
Comprehensive catalog of AI writing patterns that make text feel machine-generated. Any single pattern used once might be fine. The problem is when multiple tropes appear together or when one trope repeats throughout a piece.
How to Use
When writing or editing prose:
- Draft the content.
- Check against the trope categories below.
- If you spot a pattern, rewrite that passage.
- Re-read the whole piece for pattern density — a few is tolerable, a cluster is not.
Trope Categories
Word Choice
Overused vocabulary and phrasing that AI defaults to. See [references/word-choice.md](references/word-choice.md).
Key offenders: "quietly", "delve", "tapestry", "landscape", "serves as", "leverage", "robust", "harness", "streamline".
Sentence Structure
Formulaic sentence patterns that no human writes at scale. See [references/sentence-structure.md](references/sentence-structure.md).
Key offenders: negative parallelism ("not X — it's Y"), dramatic countdowns ("Not X. Not Y. Just Z."), self-posed rhetorical questions, anaphora abuse, tricolon abuse, gerund fragment litanies.
Paragraph Structure
Layout and organization patterns that betray AI generation. See [references/paragraph-structure.md](references/paragraph-structure.md).
Key offenders: short punchy fragments as standalone paragraphs, listicles disguised as prose.
Tone
Voice and framing habits that sound performative. See [references/tone.md](references/tone.md).
Key offenders: false suspense ("Here's the kicker"), patronizing analogies ("Think of it as..."), false vulnerability, stakes inflation, vague attributions, invented concept labels.
Formatting
Visual and typographic tells. See [references/formatting.md](references/formatting.md).
Key offenders: em-dash addiction, bold-first bullets, unicode decoration.
Composition
Document-level structural problems. See [references/composition.md](references/composition.md).
Key offenders: fractal summaries, dead metaphors beaten into the ground, historical analogy stacking, one-point dilution, signposted conclusions.
Quick Self-Check
Before delivering prose, ask:
- Did I use the same sentence structure more than twice in a row?
- Did I use "not X — it's Y" or "Here's the thing" anywhere?
- Did I stack three or more historical examples back-to-back?
- Did I inflate the stakes beyond what the content warrants?
- Would a human actually write a first draft this way?
- Does any passage sound like it belongs on a motivational poster?
The One Rule
Write like a human: varied, imperfect, specific.
Source & license
This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.
- Author: joshuadavidthomas
- Source: joshuadavidthomas/agent-skills
- License: MIT
Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.
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Versions
- v0.1.0 Imported from the upstream source.