There is a sentence shape that current language models reach for the way a nervous speaker reaches for "um". It negates a modest framing before pivoting on a comma or semicolon and inflating: the thing under discussion turns out to be more than what you thought. Grander. Deeper. Once you learn the shape, you meet it everywhere: product pages, keynote scripts, school essays, wedding speeches.
The template has legitimate rhetorical ancestry. Negation-then-elevation is a classical figure, and a skilled writer deploys it for genuine reversals — moments where the reader's assumption really does need correcting. The machine version differs in two ways. It appears at saturation, several times a page. And the negated half is usually a straw man nobody held: no reader believed the software was "just a tool" until the sentence insisted otherwise.
Tellmark counts these constructions under entry S-06, weighted at the maximum, with no free allowance. The rule matches the standard variants, including the semicolon pivot and the paired-conjunction form. The maximum weighting reflects a working judgement recorded in the scoring specification: of every sentence-level rule in the catalogue, this one is expected to separate unedited model output from professional prose most sharply. That is stated as a hypothesis awaiting a labelled corpus, not a measured result.
The remedy
What should replace it? State the positive claim and let it stand. If the contrast genuinely matters, because some named person or school of thought actually held the smaller view, then name them, and the sentence stops being a template and becomes an argument. Specificity is the whole difference. A reversal earns its drama when the reader can check who was wrong.
One caution for editors using the tool on this pattern: quoted material triggers it, as quoted material should. A media piece analysing a politician's speech will inherit the speech's constructions. Read the highlights and attribute them; judge the running prose on its own count. The footer below reports this page's score, quoted specimens included.