37 Words & Patterns That Instantly Flag Your Novel as AI‑Written

If you’re writing fiction with AI assistance, there are 37 specific words and sentence patterns that quietly tell every reader, agent, and reviewer that a machine touched your manuscript. This guide is the cheat sheet I wish someone had handed me three years ago. Free, instant, no upsell.

• The exact word listEvery banned word and phrase, organized by failure mode (filler verbs, AI-tells, hedge words, lazy emotional shorthand).
• The sentence patterns to rewriteThe five rhythmic shapes that read as AI even when every individual word looks fine. Plus the swap-in patterns that don’t.
• How to apply it across a full manuscriptThe 20-minute pass that turns AI-shaped prose into prose that reads human. The same pass I run on every Shattered Crown chapter.

Written by M.A.A. Hussain · Author of the Shattered Crown trilogy · Trust signal: this same banned-words pass is what kept the trilogy out of the AI-tell trap. See the books on Amazon.