How to Avoid AI Formulaic Writing Structures

Writing Tip: Conduct experiments with the way you structure your writing and language. It’s okay not to adhere to a perfectly structured framework. There’s no substitute for the richness of human language. 

When you’re in middle school English class and you first learn about writing, teachers encourage a formulaic writing structure. 

You might write a thesis statement, and then every subsequent paragraph maps back to that thesis statement, until the final concluding paragraph that wraps it all up neatly together. Or, if you’re trying your hand at fiction, you construct a very clear beginning, middle, and end. 

Basically, these structures are how all writing is formed, more or less. But there’s a lot of room for nuance in that “more or less.” As writers grow more sophisticated, they experiment with form, voice, and style. 

ChatGPT writes with very little nuance or flair. Often, you can pick out AI-generated writing by its lack of creativity in form. There’s a very formal language structure that AI uses, and it is most comfortable spitting out responses with a clear beginning, middle, and end; sort of like how you were taught to write in middle school when you were first structuring your essays. 

That’s because ChatGPT generates text based on statistical patterns in its training data. It doesn’t have a genuine understanding of context or emotion, so it will lean on the common denominators that are, well, the most common. What’s the word that people most often use on a certain subject? How are they most likely to describe a certain thing? 10/10 times, ChatGPT will default to that word, that structure of writing style. 

When it comes to formal language structure, ChatGPT writes like a middle schooler, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. So, as a human, break away from that structure. 

Whether you use non-linear narratives or stream of consciousness, use a format that challenges the conventional norms of writing. Signal your humanity by using a surprising set of words or phrases, and reference your “thesis statement” outside of the conventional places where you would normally reference it.