The short staccato phrasing is exhausting to read regardless of who or what writes that slop.
It's always been considered bad writing, and strongly reminds me of a elementary student trying to hit their word quota for an essay.
It's always been considered bad writing, and strongly reminds me of a elementary student trying to hit their word quota for an essay.
No, it hasn't. It's a distinctive style that some writers use. Like everything in life, it can be used wrongly, but staccato phrasing isn't "always considered bad writing". Consider this:
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“What’s yours?” George asked them.
“I don’t know,” one of the men said. “What do you want to eat, Al?”
“I don’t know,” said Al. “I don’t know what I want to eat.”
Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.
“I’ll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potato,” the first man said.
“It isn’t ready yet.”
“What the hell do you put it on the card for?”
“That’s the dinner,” George explained. “You can get that at six o’clock.”
George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.
“It’s five o’clock.”
“The clock says twenty minutes past five,” the second man said.
“It’s twenty minutes fast.”
“Oh, to hell with the clock,” the first man said. “What have you got to eat?”
---
As an aside, I link badly written student homework with purple prose and elaborate sentences that lead nowhere, rather than with punchy staccato style.
I agree that short staccato phrasing is not inherently bad. I think it's just how it is used, and that when AI chooses to write in that style it is often "bad" in some sort of way I have trouble defining precisely.
My point is this style of bursts of short sentences, without flowery language, is a style some acknowledged writers do use in real life. It's not, by itself, a mark of bad quality or AI writing. In fact, ChatGPT uses way more elaborate sentences in its replies to my queries (and it drives me nuts).