Glossary

Plain-language definitions of the terms writers run into.

Perplexity

Perplexity is a measurement of how surprised a language model is when it encounters a piece of text — technically, how unpredictable each next word turns out to be given the words before it. Text that follows the statistical grooves of typical writing (common phrasings, expected word orders) has low perplexity; unusual, creative, or irregular writing has high perplexity.

Burstiness

Burstiness describes the degree of variation in sentence length and structure within a piece of writing. High burstiness means the text alternates between short and long sentences unpredictably — a twenty-word sentence followed by a four-word one. Low burstiness means sentences cluster around similar lengths with regular rhythm. Human writing, measured across large samples, tends toward higher burstiness; machine-generated text clusters at uniform lengths because models resolve each next-sentence decision toward the statistically average choice.

Patchwriting

Patchwriting is the practice of restating a source text by replacing some of its words with synonyms while keeping the original sentence structure largely intact. The result sits in an uncanny middle zone: not a direct quote, not a genuine restatement. Howard's classic description calls it 'copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes.'