TOM GILLINGHAM
We are in an epidemic of stylistic negation – the increasing use of the sentence structure that runs, it’s not x, it’s y. Deployed at ever greater scale, it undermines the clarity of messages that companies and organisations seek to communicate.
Ahead of the World Cup, I read an analysis piece in a Scottish publication from a senior figure in the game that used the formulation four times in the opening 164 words. That’s not an accident — it’s a structural commitment. And you know what? It shows. (Sometimes it’s fun to put all the AI clichés into one place)
This sentence formulation is often (but not exclusively) driven by AI and, if you’ve not picked up on it before – I guarantee you will now see it everywhere. But it’s not as simple as it might at first appear, it predates AI and has been an advertising industry darling for years. See This is not just food… it’s M&S food.
AI has taken this structure to its water-and-electricity-powered heart, meaning that, as with anything mass-produced, the resulting volume of this formulation makes it less likely to stand out.
It is everywhere.
Trying to apply the ‘oh, it’s AI-written’ gotcha isn’t particularly interesting or useful, though. I don’t want to restart the em-dash wars of ’24/’25. If we stop obsessing about who held the pen, we can get back to the resulting words and their impact.
Taking aside LinkedIn’s pleasingly violent ‘seems like AI slop’ button, there are two bigger communications issues that come with the creeping ubiquity of the ‘it’s not x, it’s y’ formulation, especially when it appears in corporate or public statements.
The first is that it adds extraneous words. This is particularly ‘expensive’ when writing things that are likely to be cut, like reactive statements or copy that needs to be parsed quickly in the wake of a crisis. It also reduces impact because we’re all flesh-and-blood pattern matching machines. The familiar becomes less compelling.
The second is more about perceptions of what is written or said. Defining something (sometimes repeatedly) by what it is not, rather than simply stating what it is or does, lacks conviction. It reads like a defensive crouch, or like apologising if someone stands on your foot. Effective communication, especially in high-pressure situations, relies on a clear and confident position – and negation dilutes it. This is especially true if that position needs to be spoken. Aloud, this sort of negative parallelism requires a listener to hold a discarded idea in their head whilst waiting for the real one.
AI also gives new power to the idea that jargon, or the ability to write in a certain way or in a certain register, is a status symbol. This can quickly become a communications nightmare, especially if complicated language is coming from insecurity or a lack of expertise. Often it is especially clear where AI has been used to pad out an already limited perspective or argument.
Word choice transforms an individual’s impact and gravitas – it’s something we work on regularly with clients – and sentence structure does the same on the page.
Amidst all the negation, there is an opportunity to stand out, simply by flipping the framing. Say what something is and, crucially, what it does or enables – then be ready to follow up with more information on what is actually asked, rather than what might be assumed.