Why Is My Writing Flagged as AI? We Used Dashes Before the Machines Did

Jeffy Susan October 1, 2026 0 comments

The dash was ours first

The first post on this blog went up on 19 February 2008. There are 372 of them now. I’ve written a lot of them, and I have a habit: I use dashes – not always the proper long one, often just the short one with a space on either side, because that’s what the keyboard gives you.

Go and look at December 2013. One post is titled “Does CDN help SEO? – CDN, Google, Page speed and ranking factors.” Another one, the same month, has a dash in its title too. ChatGPT was nine years away.

Today a dash in a blog post gets read as a machine’s fingerprint. So do neat lists, tidy paragraphs and polite openings. Which is a bit rich, because the machines learned all of that from people like us (and, I suppose, from us). We even published a piece this April about a CMS that is actually called EmDash, which didn’t help.

So here’s the odd new job. It isn’t enough to write as a human anymore. You have to write as a human who can’t be mistaken for a machine. Human-human, if you like.

So why is my writing flagged as AI?

Short answer: because you write the way models were taught to write, and they were taught by people like you. So the first thing everybody tries is scrubbing out the habits. It’s the obvious move, and you can’t win that way.

You take out the dashes, and then someone says the real giveaway is the word “delve,” so you take that out, and then it’s groups of three, and then it’s any sentence shaped like “it’s not this, it’s that,” and then it’s being too polite, and by the time you’ve removed every habit a model picked up from human writers, which is all of them, because that’s where it got them, what’s left is a flat, careful page that sounds like nobody at all, which is, of course, exactly how a machine sounds.

The list of tells changes every few months anyway. Dashes were the 2024 tell. I don’t know what next year’s will be, and neither does anyone selling you a checker.

About those checkers. A Stanford team ran seven popular AI detectors over 91 essays written by people for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language). The detectors wrongly flagged about 61 percent of those human essays as AI-written, while scoring essays by American eighth graders almost perfectly. That paper is from 2023 and the tools have changed since, so treat the number as a warning more than a measurement. Still. We write from Coimbatore, India, for readers in the US, the UK and Australia. You can guess which pile we’d land in. If you’ve been falsely accused of using AI, this is probably why, and it says nothing about your writing.

And yet the worry behind all this is fair. Merriam-Webster made “slop” its word of the year for 2025. People aren’t imagining the flood. They’re just using the wrong test to spot it.

Yes, I use AI to write. Here’s how.

I’d rather say this plainly than have you wonder. A model typed the first draft of this post.

What I don’t do is ask it for “a blog on a trending topic.” That’s where slop comes from: the machine supplies the thinking and a person supplies the publish button. I do it the other way round. I bring the idea. I give my opinions, my own inputs, what I’d recommend, and a clear path for the argument to take. Then I work on what comes back. I ask for it again, more than once. I add views it missed. I delete the stereotypes (there are always stereotypes).

That’s closer to working with a ghostwriter or a patient editor than to pressing a button, and writers used both long before 2022. It’s the same idea we follow in code, where the AI works inside limits a person sets.

Google, for what it’s worth, isn’t asking anyone to pretend either. Its guidance on generative AI content cares about accuracy, quality and relevance, and suggests telling readers how a piece was made. So I’m telling you.

Where the slop sneaks back in

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. The ideas are yours, so you assume the post is yours. But readers judge the sentences first, long before they reach the idea, and the sentences are still the model’s.

Two things happen in that gap.

The model smooths your opinions. You say “this is a mistake.” The draft says “this may not be ideal for every business.” Same topic, no spine. It’s worth checking that every opinion survived at full strength.

And the model keeps its own mold. Your input gets poured into a warm-up opening, even-sized sections and a summary at the end. You can delete a hundred clichés and still be left with the biggest one, which is the shape.

The fix is smaller than it sounds. If you only have time to hand-write three things, make them the opening, the ending, and the lines where you take a side. Those carry most of the voice. The middle can stay drafted and, as far as I can tell, nobody notices.

What works on every post

You can’t tell a story from your own history every time. We certainly can’t, not across 372 posts. These don’t need one.

• The post takes a side. “Most agencies do X, and we think that’s a mistake” needs no anecdote, only nerve.
• Each section has one detail only a doer would know. Generic: “caching can cause issues on stores.” Practitioner: “on older WooCommerce stores, a full-page cache shows every visitor the same cart count unless the cart fragments call runs, and that call can’t be cached, so it ends up the slowest thing on the page.”
• The depth is uneven on purpose. Skip what the reader already knows and spend 400 words on the one thing that matters.
• There’s one honest “it depends,” in the one place where it really does, and it says what it depends on.
• The warm-up opening and the summary ending are gone. This costs nothing.

When you do have history, use it, because it’s the one thing nobody can copy. In November 2016 I wrote about a client whose designer left with every server password, and I put four exclamation marks in one sentence, followed by “Wow!” It isn’t elegant – but somebody was clearly upset when they typed it, and models don’t get upset.

The test I use now

If you came here asking “why is my writing flagged as AI,” I’d gently suggest that’s the wrong thing to fix. I’ve stopped asking “does this look human?” as well. The answer changes with the fashion.

If the answer is yes, it’s slop, whether a person or a model typed it (content farms were turning it out by hand long before 2022). If the answer is no, the post proves itself, dashes and all. That matters for search as well, and it’s a big part of how we’re approaching SEO in 2026.

(There are three dashes in this post, by the way. One of them sits in a title from 2013. I’m keeping all three.)

If you’ve found a better test, write it in the comments and I’ll add it here with credit.