We designed the Community Support Space series to facilitate discussion about the issues and concerns all of you, the OHA community, are currently facing, and any opportunities on the horizon. For the next open forum, we’re giving special attention to people working on regional oral history projects or who are in regional oral history groups. […]
Planning to attend the 2025 OHA Annual Meeting in Atlanta? Whether you’re presenting, not presenting, or joining us from outside the U.S., you can apply to our scholarship funding to help offset the cost of attending. We offer three types of scholarships: OHA encourages applications from students, professionals, and community practitioners from a wide range […]
The Conversation explores how tools like ChatGPT are subtly reshaping the way we write. While these tools can save time and improve clarity, they can also smooth out our quirks and dilute our voice. As the author wisely notes, “writing should be about expressing your ideas in your own way.”
Have you noticed certain words and phrases popping up everywhere lately?
Phrases such as “delve into” and “navigate the landscape” seem to feature in everything from social media posts to news articles and academic publications. They may sound fancy, but their overuse can make a text feel monotonous and repetitive.
This trend may be linked to the increasing use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs). These tools are designed to make writing easier by offering suggestions based on patterns in the text they were trained on.
However, these patterns can lead to the overuse of certain stylistic words and phrases, resulting in works that don’t closely resemble genuine human writing.
Generative AI tools are trained on vast amounts of text from various sources. As such, they tend to favour the most common words and phrases in their outputs.
Since ChatGPT’s release, the use of words such as “delves”, “showcasing”, “underscores”, “pivotal”, “realm” and “meticulous” has surged in academic writing.
And although most of the research has looked specifically at academic writing, the stylistic language trend has appeared in various other forms of writing, including student essays and school applications. As one editor told Forbes, “tapestry” is a particularly common offending term in cases where AI was used to write a draft:
I no longer believe there’s a way to innocently use the word ‘tapestry’ in an essay; if the word ‘tapestry’ appears, it was generated by ChatGPT.
The overuse of certain words and phrases leads to writing losing its personal touch. It becomes harder to distinguish between individual voices and perspectives and everything takes on a robotic undertone.
Also, words such as “revolutionise” or “intriguing” – while they might seem like they’re giving you a more polished product – can actually make writing harder to understand.
Stylish and/or flowery language doesn’t communicate ideas as effectively as clear and straightforward language. Beyond this, one study found simple and precise words not only enhance comprehension, but also make the writer appear more intelligent.
Lastly, the overuse of stylistic words can make writing boring. Writing should be engaging and varied; relying on a few buzzwords will lead to readers tuning out.
There’s currently no research that can give us an exact list of the most common stylistic words used by ChatGPT; this would require an exhaustive analysis of every output ever generated. That said, here’s what ChatGPT itself presented when asked the question.
So how can we fix this? Here are some ideas:
1. Be aware of repetition
If you’re using a tool such as ChatGPT, pay attention to how often certain words or phrases come up. If you notice the same terms appearing again and again, try switching them out for simpler and/or more original language. Instead of saying “delve into” you could just say “explore”, or “look at it closely”.
2. Ask for clear language
Much of what you get out of ChatGPT will come down to the specific prompt you give it. If you don’t want complex language, try asking it to “write clearly, without using complex words”.
3. Edit your work
ChatGPT can be a helpful starting point for writing many different types of text, but editing its outputs remains important. By reviewing and changing certain words and phrases, you can still add your own voice to the output.
Being creative with synonyms is one way to do this. You could use a thesaurus, or think more carefully about what you’re trying to communicate in your text – and how you might do this in a new way.
4. Customise AI settings
Many AI tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Claude allow you to adjust the writing style through settings or tailored prompts. For example, you can prioritise clarity and simplicity, or create an exclusion list to avoid certain words.
By being more mindful of how we use generative AI and making an effort to write with clarity and originality, we can avoid falling into the AI style trap.
In the end, writing should be about expressing your ideas in your own way. While ChatGPT can help, it’s up to each of us to make sure we’re saying what we really want to – and not what an AI tool tells us to.
The next offering in the Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH) series of “Sharpen Your Skills” advanced online workshops is “Applying AI to Oral History” and will take place on July 16, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. CDT. This session serves as both an introduction to artificial intelligence platforms in general and the ways in […]
New episodes of 1945 available Thursdays. View as a webpage.
1945
Episode 5: Japan Surrenders
In this episode, hosts Kirk Saduski and Donald Miller speak with historians Richard Frank, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and John McManus about the August 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent surrender of Japan. Plus, Academy Award nominee Patricia Clarkson reads an excerpt from Hiroshima by John Hersey.
Episode 5: Japan Surrenders
Topics Covered in This Episode:
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Japan surrenders
V-J Day
Experience of WWII veterans returning home
New episodes of 1945 are available each Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dr. Sarah Lewis has compiled a story—a history—of how the name came to describe white people and continues to be used to this day.
Brenee Brown mentions this book in her podcast: “In this episode, Dr. Sarah Lewis joins me again to talk about her new book, The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America. With examples from her historical research, she walks me through the power of visual culture in generating equity and justice. We talk about how what we see and what’s left unseen shapes everything we believe about ourselves and other people — and how we can start changing the narrative about who counts and who belongs in America.”
Harvard University Press says this:
The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations—and offers a way to begin to dismantle it. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Lewis examines the Caucasian War’s role in the nineteenth century in revealing the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now.
“In ‘The Unseen Truth,’ it is almost as if Sarah Lewis has given us a new pair of glasses that allow us to see history in ways that were previously unclear… It has changed the way I observe the world. Lewis has provided us with an indispensable resource to better see ourselves.”
— Clint Smith, author of “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Americans have long been invested in an imaginary story: that whiteness stems from the mountainous region between Eastern Europe and Western Asia known as the Caucasus. In The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Sarah Lewis tells the story of the origins of the “Caucasian race” and the concealment of its discrediting in the early 20th century. Lewis has written a bold intellectual history, drawing from school atlases and encyclopedias, circus sideshows, yellow journalism, and presidential files to reveal the false foundations of ideas of race that continue to shape the United States.
The Nation provides something of an overview. Blumenbach based his conclusions at least in part on Phrenology, a long debunked pseudoscience popular in the nineteenth century to classify and describe human behavior.
by Sarah Lewis Buy this book
The Caucasus was identified as the homeland of the white race by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in his 1795 treatise On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, which was written to provide a more scientific footing for the notion of polygenesis: the theory that God created separate human races for different parts of the earth. Blumenbach believed that all living humans were descended from the family of Noah after they came stumbling out of the ark when it landed on Mount Ararat in the southern Caucasus. In his telling, God sent Noah’s darker-skinned sons off to other lands to begin the African and Asian races, while his lightest-skinned son simply remained in place. Blumenbach further pinpointed one local group, the Circassians, as the “purest” examples of the white race, on the basis of nothing more than travelers’ tales about the exemplary beauty of Circassian women.
