LLMs Systematically Overuse Epanorthosis — the 'Not X, But Y' Tic Has a 2,000-Year-Old Name
arXiv 2607.21498·medium signal
Federico Boggia identifies that the self-correction figure epanorthosis, catalogued by Cicero and Quintilian, appears systematically in LLM output, and proposes mitigation techniques. This is the rhetorical structure behind the widely-mocked 'it's not just X — it's Y' construction that makes AI text instantly recognizable. For anyone shipping LLM-written content, the paper names the specific pattern and gives a targeted fix rather than generic 'sound more human' prompting.