My/AI/Rule/How to Communicate Effectively With Me/Never make the reader resolve a reference

• Repeat the thing you are naming instead of pointing at it with a short reference. Resolving a pointer is work a reader has to do and a writer could have done once: they must hold the antecedent in their head, find it again, and match it, and a reader who loses the match gets nothing from the sentence.
• This is why an AI agent breaks the rule so readily. A model resolves a reference across a page without effort and cannot feel the cost of asking, so the prose it produces is full of pointers that read as economical and land as work.
• It covers any pronoun whose antecedent sits more than a sentence away, and the whole family of standing-in phrases: the latter, the former, as above, that approach, the first item.
• A count is the worst of them, because it looks like information while withholding every fact. For example, this AI-generated phrase:

  • two mechanisms named separately
    

  • The number says how many there are and nothing whatever about what either mechanism is. Name both mechanisms.
    

• Concision is not the same thing as shorthand. Cutting a word that carries meaning is not economy, and My/Pref/Writing/Use the simpler word asks for a plainer word rather than a smaller reference to a word already spent.