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by morleytj 298 days ago
It's very common to see the particular syntactic structure of restating a point in the following general manner from Claude/ChatGPT in my experience and that of others:

"It's not X -- it's Y." or "This isn't just X -- It's actually Y."

Usually with an emdash there as well for the separation. As I said it's very plausibly becoming more common among people not using LLM-assisted writing too, just from seeing the stylistic approach used more often and having it spread naturally, but I do have been seeing it spread with dramatic speed over the last couple years. I even catch myself using other phrasing more often from reading it more. I think it's just part of how language spreads, honestly.
1 comments
bradstewart 298 days ago
Interesting, thanks. I've always been a fairly "heavy" (vs other people) user of the emdash after a high school english teacher made us use one in every paper to learn how they worked (along with a colon), and I've been a fan ever sense.

The "it's not ... it's" phrasing though definitely stands out as a bit odd when repeated.

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morleytj 298 days ago
Yeah, I also tend to have heavier usage of them. I'm not exactly sure why I do though, I don't have a particular incident like yours in high school. I think I just read too many blog posts as a teenager, haha.

It is a bit of an odd repetition, right? I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

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dpoloncsak 298 days ago
>I wonder if anyone has done analysis on usage of that construction by year.

This just hit the front page of HN for like an hour or two today. Not that exact construction (It's not just x, -it's y) but this suggests that (English) speakers are starting to use 'AI Buzzwords' in speech. (Words like delve, intricate, etc.)

I think it's safe to extrapolate that the construction would also start to appear more often in human-written and spoken content as well, but I'm sure there's other factors at play.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045500 Relevant article: https://news.fsu.edu/news/education-society/2025/08/26/on-sc... Relevant paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00238

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