Models have defaults. Ask for a paragraph and you get the same handful of sentence shapes back, whatever the subject was. Nothing in them is wrong. A draft built out of defaults still reads flat, and the reader feels it before they can point at it.
Five edits, in this order.
Hunt the long dash. Your word processor calls it an em dash. Ctrl+F, count them. Models reach for it constantly, and it is not a character your keyboard makes easy to type. Replace each one with a full stop or a comma. If the sentence collapses without it, it was two sentences pretending to be one.
Count the sentences that open with "This". This means, this is why, this allows. Three in a paragraph is a model stitching clauses it never planned. Rewrite so the subject is a thing rather than a pointer backwards.
Find the threes. "Faster, cheaper, and more reliable." "Clear, concise, and actionable." Exactly three adjectives, twice on a page, is worth a second look. Cut one or add a fourth. Either one breaks the cadence.
Find "not just X, but Y". Its cousin is "it is not about X, it is about Y". Both read as insight and carry none. Delete the first half and keep whatever claim survives.
Read the last line on its own. Models close by summarising what they just said. People close on the next thing to do, or a question, or nothing at all. If the last line only restates, cut it and see whether anyone notices.
Run the mechanical two first. Searching for a character and counting sentence openers takes no judgment, which is why you will still do them at five on a Friday. Three, four and five need you awake, and by then you have read the piece twice.
There are more of these than five. The Slop Tells Checklist is on the shelf here, free, and free on the site: https://nerdychefs.ai/?utm_source=bmac&utm_medium=supporter_post&utm_campaign=bmac_weekly_sep2026
One caution. This is a pass for your own drafts. Plenty of people write long dashes and triples on purpose, and telling a colleague their email pattern-matches to a language model lands badly however it was meant.
Noodle