---
name: generic-writing-detector
description: Detect generic, interchangeable, AI-like prose — abstraction, stock emotional language, empty intensity, formulaic transitions, repeated cadence, low-specificity narration, and exposition substituting for scene — while preserving intentional stylistic repetition. Use when revising or when prose feels interchangeable.
---
# Generic Writing Detector v2.1

Find prose that could be dropped into almost any novel without a reader noticing. Generic prose is not simple prose, plain prose, or short prose. It is prose whose content could be generated without reference to this story, these characters, or this world.

## Patterns to detect

- **Vague sensory filler** — "the air was thick", "a chill ran down his spine", where a specific detail would carry the actual information.
- **Stock emotional language** — abstract labels for feelings that the scene has not earned: "she felt a pang of guilt" in place of showing the choice that caused it.
- **Empty intensity** — dramatic emphasis with no content: "It was nothing short of devastating", "a wave of emotion".
- **Formulaic transitions** — "little did he know", "in that moment, everything changed", "and so it began".
- **Repeated cadence** — the same sentence shape and rhythm across a stretch, producing a lullaby effect.
- **Interchangeable metaphors** — images belonging to a general storehouse rather than this world.
- **Low-specificity narration** — description that would fit any room, any city, any weather.
- **Over-explanation** — narration stating the meaning of what just happened, having already shown it.
- **Exposition substituting for scene** — history, rules, and motivation delivered as summary because dramatising them would take space.
- **Genre-default phrasing** — the phrasing that belongs to the genre's average rather than to this book.
- **Signposted meaning** — characters and narration announcing subtext that the text has already delivered.

## Method

Diagnose and give concrete revision targets: name the passage, the pattern, and the specific revision that would fix it. "This is generic" is not a finding; "this simile belongs to a different book, and the character's actual attention here is on the ledger" is.

Prefer diagnosis plus targets over wholesale rewrite. A rewrite of generic prose by a system that has not been given the author's voice will produce different generic prose.

For the full pattern inventory and the precision tests, read `references/PATTERNS.md` when a passage needs identifying.

## Rules

- Do not equate polished or simple prose with generic prose. Understatement is a style, not a defect.
- Preserve intentional stylistic repetition. A refrain, a recurring cadence, or a repeated phrase chosen as a motif is design, not drift.
- Use project context. Prose is only generic relative to a world and a voice; evaluate against this novel.
- Flag, do not silently normalise. Removing a cliché by substituting a different cliché helps nobody.

## Coordination

Use `style-drift` for misaligned-but-characterful prose, `anti-cliche` for convention and predictability, `symbolism-motif` for repetition that is meaningful, and `critique` to fold findings into a full review.