Bernadette Soriano

They asked if I used AI—not out of malice, but sheer disbelief. The prose moved with too much precision, too much ease, its fluency apparently too sophisticated for a face that still gets carded at R-13 films.


When words exceed expectation, doubt becomes default—especially, it seems, when one dares to use an em dash.

It would’ve been easier, perhaps, to play small. To pare my sentences down to grayscale—subject, verb, object. Palatable. Unthreatening. But then I wouldn’t be writing; I’d be muting. And writing, at its core, is refusal. It resists flattening. It is the slow burn of complexity in a culture obsessed with speed.

To write is to resist the simplicity this world demands.

No—I didn’t turn to AI. I turned to my own mind: imperfect, unautomated, wholly mine. To paperbacks I dog-eared under weak light. To edits I made sleeplessly. To the quiet compulsion of reshaping a line until it felt honest. What they called effortless was effort, honed.

Let’s be honest—this was never about punctuation. The em dash was the scapegoat; the crime was precision. What drew suspicion wasn’t grammar, but fluency—language too sharp to seem unassisted, tone too deliberate to pass as real. In today’s institutions, mediocrity has become the safer disguise. Write too well, and you're suspect. Sound different, and you're dismissed.

This is no anomaly. More than once, I’ve been treated as though intelligence were performance, not presence. I’ve seen it in classmates who quote Baldwin over lunch, who tuck poetry into the corners of lab notes—writers whose fluency, young and brown and female, absent of pedigree, draws skepticism over praise. 

As if talent demands explanation. As if effort must arrive with machinery in tow.

Beneath the accusation sits an assumption: left to her own devices, the student wouldn’t have written this. Yet what of a student whose tools are discipline, restlessness, intent? One who writes not for praise, rather for sense-making—because the world remains incoherent until rendered into language?

A mind set to unravel confusion wields no shortcuts—only resolve.

Writing, for me, resists transaction—it excavates. Each draft digs deeper; each revision brushes dust from what felt buried. I choose punctuation the way a conductor cues silence: not absence, but impact. If such precision reads artificial, perhaps we’ve grown unaccustomed to the human mind at full tilt.

Psycholinguistics reminds what suspicion overlooks: fluency is human. Levelt’s model of speech production frames writing as a cognitive feat—one of conceptualization, formulation, articulation. These aren’t mechanical stages, rather mental negotiations, sculpted by memory, intuition, control. To read polish as pretense is to ignore the architecture of intellect beneath each line.

Polish is the scar tissue of hard-won understanding.

As Ronald Kellogg insists, fluency is not evidence of fraud—it is the unmistakable imprint of a mind that has done the work.

And yet, the “fluency heuristic”—as coined by Alter and Oppenheimer, betrays us in practice. We trust polished prose—until it emerges in an unexpected voice. Then, elegance breeds suspicion. Doubt settles not on the sentence’s content, rather on the clash between expression and assumed identity. 

Amid claims of meritocracy, one question endures: who is truly allowed to sound this way?

What does it reveal about us—that we flinch at the sight of depth articulated by the young? That eloquence, rather seen as cultivated, is too often presumed inherited—bestowed only upon the pedigreed, the palatable. That clarity invites interrogation unless the face, the name, the cadence conforms to a narrow archetype? 

This is not merely dispiriting. It is dehumanizing. Unfortunately so.

When brilliance unsettles comfort zones, suspicion is the reflex, not the exception.

We inhabit a culture in which excellence demands apology, and skill arrives freighted with disclaimers. Every fluent sentence demands a caveat—I swear I wrote this myself. Our bar for authenticity has lowered; so too, it seems, has our faith in one another’s effort.

This suspicion never dwells quietly. It thrives in systems that starve education while heaping demands. In classrooms that praise creativity with words yet punish it with grades. In institutions that romanticize struggle yet fear the confident.

The impostor phenomenon—first articulated by Clance and Imes—names a familiar ache: high achievers unable to inhabit their own success, gripped by the fear of exposure as frauds. But impostor syndrome is no private pathology; it is socially inscribed. When fluency invites suspicion, self-doubt becomes its armor.

Impostor syndrome is the echo of society’s refusal to see us.

More insidiously, academic profiling rarely acts alone; it intersects with race, class, and gender. Who earns the benefit of the doubt when writing well? Who faces suspicion instead? Who is told—explicitly or implicitly—that they speak too eloquently for their skin, too fluently for their origins, too precisely for their gender? The answer, weary in its repetition, remains tragically consistent.

Herein lies the paradox: institutions that laud academic excellence frequently recoil when it emerges from the unexpected. They urge us to aim high, yet the moment we land above average, they suspect springs concealed beneath our soles.

In this era awash with artificial intelligence, the challenge transcends mere detection of machines; it compels us to confront the entrenched biases that eclipse unaided human brilliance. When suspicion calcifies into instinct, we endanger more than misjudging algorithms—we imperil our very capacity to trust human potential for growth.

Writing transcends automation; it demands orchestration. Each sentence emerges not as algorithmic mimicry but as the imprint of lived contradiction, compulsion, and the pursuit of order within chaos. Crafting prose is no mechanical act; it is a deeply human labor—anchored in a mind that reads obsessively, revises relentlessly, thinks in spirals, and speaks through subordinated clauses. Life, after all, resists reduction to bullet points.

To write is to wield chaos and order in equal measure.

I will neither dilute my voice to soothe comfort nor suppress the full range of my expression to satisfy reassurance. I refuse to apologize for deliberate writing or to masquerade as artificial intelligence simply because the truth proves inconvenient.

I write to unsettle comfort, never to conform to it.

And as for the algorithm? Let it try to replicate that.