Writing fingerprint · Funk
Funk is the smell a pile of small tics leaves on a draft.
Eight measures count the habits people have learned to read as machine-made. Writers use every one of them now and then, so W10 never bans one. It flags a draft only when it uses a tic far more often than they do; using it less is always fine.
In numbers
Where the writers sit on the eight tics.
| Measure | Writers |
|---|---|
| Dashes per 100 sentences | 9 ± 6 |
| "Quietly" words per 100 sentences | 0 ± 0.5 |
| Not X, but Y per 100 sentences | 0.8 ± 0.5 |
| -ing tails per 100 sentences | 1.5 ± 0.7 |
| Do-and-done chains % of sentences | 0.1 ± 0.5 |
| Things with minds % of sentences | 1.4 ± 0.8 |
| Stops being X, becomes Y per 100 sentences | 0 ± 0.5 |
| Announcers per 100 sentences | 0.2 ± 0.5 |
The middle and spread of our reference set. Writers use more dashes than most people expect: about nine in every hundred sentences, and some of them twice that. A dash is a tell only when it turns up in every other sentence.
Dashes
A dash in every other sentence.
Good writers use the em dash for an aside or a turn. A draft that hangs a dash on most of its sentences reads as if one hand wrote all of them. W10 counts em dashes, and en dashes or double hyphens standing in for one.
The launch went well — better than expected — and the team moved on.
"Quietly" words
Adverbs of a manner nobody can check.
Quietly, silently, subtly, seamlessly, effortlessly. Each claims something happened in a way nobody saw, which a reader can't check and rarely needs. Writers in our set almost never use them; one in a hundred sentences already counts as a little off.
The new pricing page quietly changed how buyers saw the product.
Not X, but Y
A claim set up only to be knocked down.
The draft names something nobody said, then corrects it. Once, it can sharpen a point. Several times, it turns every paragraph into the same trick. W10 counts it in one sentence ("It's not X, it's Y") and across two (a negated sentence, then "It's...").
It's not a writing problem. It's a planning problem.
-ing tails
A sentence that trails off on a verb in -ing.
A main clause, a comma, then a clause opening on "making", "giving", "leaving" or "ensuring". The tail usually restates the point as a benefit, and it lands at the end of a sentence where the reader expects the weight. Writers do it once or twice in a hundred sentences.
The page loads in under a second, making it easy to share.
Do-and-done chains
An instruction tied to its result with "and".
"Do this and that happens." The sentence gives an order and promises a payoff in one breath. It works once as a punchline. A page of them reads like a recipe for results nobody saw. W10 counts the imperative ("Keep your prices in one place and your posts stop disagreeing") and the same shape with "you" ("You say it three times and it sounds like AI").
Name the customer and the post stops sounding like a brochure.
Things with minds
Things that speak, know and want.
A thing that speaks, knows, wants, feels or agrees: "the title answers the question", "your posts disagree", "the data tells us". Things may act, but people rarely write as if they think. In four drafts our writer produced before W10's rules, about 10 in every 100 sentences gave a thing a mind. After the rules, 2.5. The writers sit at 1.4.
It told us what someone typed into a box. It said nothing about what they were worried about, what they had already been told, or what would make them close the tab.
"It" is a web form. The form did not tell anybody anything: a person filled it in, and the sentence hides them.
Stops being X, becomes Y
A change told as a before-and-after.
"It stops being a blog and becomes a sales team." The sentence stages a transformation instead of showing what changed, for whom, on which day. None of the writers in our reference set wrote it once in about 6,000 words each, so a single use in a short post already stands out. W10 counts it in one sentence, and across two ("The page is no longer a brochure. It becomes a reply.").
Once the facts live in one place, the blog stops being a chore and becomes an asset.
Announcers
Announcing the point before making it.
"The hard part is", "Here's the thing", "It's worth noting", "Let that sink in". The words promise a point instead of making it, and a reader learns to skip them. Writers in our set use one in about five hundred sentences.
Here's the thing: most teams never read their own blog.
Questions
About funk.
Does W10 penalise a draft with no dashes?
Is Funk an AI detector?
Why are the dashes allowed at all?
"The shape" lines are written for this page to show each tic. "Claude before W10": 4 drafts our writer, running on Claude, produced on 4 briefs for our own blog in October 2026; "after": the same briefs with W10's rules added to its instructions. Our writer already strips dashes, "quietly" and announcers before a draft is done, so those drafts have none to quote. Coloured with W10V4's reference set. "Writers" is the middle and spread of our reference set of essayists, authors and company blogs.
Paste a draft and see where it sits.
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