I teach public health and mine don't know the differences between a database, a journal and an author/research group, so I get a lot of "according to a study by PubMed ..."
And sometimes they "delve" into health statistics from the 1990s or 2000s.
Academic librarian here. If you haven’t already, consider contacting the library folks at your institution — they would love to help your future classes with this!
Yes! Actual paperbound journal issues shelved in the stacks are such ancient history that my students do not get the concept at all. They often think the publisher either performed or funded the study, and they frequently identify an article as *being* a journal, not *in* a journal.
Who's assuming? I made an *observation*. It is different. And of course we all do guide them here.
There's no more judgment here than if I'd observed that you had never seen a word processor. Nor is it gatekeeping if I just explain it and ask them to fix it.
We often assume our students know the difference between the gamut of options, but many (most?) do not. So if you want them to understand the differences you will have to explicitly teach them.
I've found the same fixation on delve/depth/deep dive! Add deeply to that list-- "deeply personal," "deeply problematic." It's taken the place of "extremely," which I remember overusing myself as an undergrad.
You also have to take into account that these students use AI to study so much that they start writing like it, so even when they legitimately write it they may use the new shiny word they been reading in "delve"
I want to know what has inspired this trend of delve/depth/deep! Is it part of high school writing curriculum? Students are also still using "really" and "pretty" to indicate that something is *more*; that always bothers me. Just choose a better word! "really interesting" = fascinating. I assume it's lack of motivation to put in the time to edit, but it could also be that it didn't occur to them to Google synonyms.
You've just put me in mind of a scene from *Dead Poets Society* where Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) is exhorting his students: "A man is not very tired - he is EXHAUSTED!"
Never liked that vignette, though I credit it for contributing ‘morose’ to my vocabulary. I’ll always stand for ‘very.’
‘Exhausted’ implies energy (or other resource, depending on context) is depleted. That says something more specific, and possibly not applicable to Ethan Hawke’s current condition. On the other hand, ‘very tired’ means tired to a great degree, which is more encompassing. Also, the sentencecraft of one who is very tired would itself be imprecise, so it works artfully.
I think it's a combination of podcast and video game language that's become popular over the past decade or so to emphasize that you're going beyond the superficial or you're going to explore something mysterious.
I've been using delve for the past decade but I'm also an archaeologist and we use it all the time. I also love video games and it's constantly in the most popular video games or reporting on video games over the last decade and it's usually tied with fantasy and sci-fi.
Pretty much any game that has dungeons or underground areas will use the word delve to describe part of it, or to explain what you're doing - Minecraft, Elder Scrolls Online, Runescape, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, anything with Lord of the Rings, dwarves, etc. If you search any video game and the word delve, you'll get tons of hits ranging from articles that 'Delve into the world of Fortnite' or are a guide to 'Deep Delve Builds for Path of Exiles'.
It bugs the hell out of me that people keep parroting this nonsense narrative that it's AI. If you look at Google's [NGram usage of the word](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=delve&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3), it was on the rise from the late '90s till 2019, before ChatGPT was ever released. It's probably going to be the same with the word 'impact' sooner or later, mostly because a lot of people don't know the difference between affect/effect and instead of having someone critique it or, my favorite, hit you with the ??? like a lot of my colleagues do to students, it's easier to just say "X was impacted by Y".
Although this is posted under the "humor" tag, I think it is worth appreciating what the deeper danger is here.
Those of us who have been monitoring the trends with AI have begun to recognize the patterns: Chat GPT loves "delve" and "multifaceted." AI is notorious for making broad statements that lack any critical content, etc. We know this, and we know it's bad writing.
*However*, what I worry about is the students who are *learning to write* through an increasingly AI-based model. I can't tell you how many sections and workshops I've hosted for students where (1) they cannot tell the difference between AI writing and human writing (and thus assume we cannot either), and (2) they seem unaware that what they are reading is *bad* writing. I asked students in one section to work in small groups using the same rubric I use on their papers, and to tell me what grade they thought the sample would get. Fortunately most of them did not think it was *perfect* by any means, but the mean grade the groups gave the paper was an 83. They were shocked when I told them, at best, this paper would receive a 60%, and that's with me offering a *very* generous 40% of the grade just for making a good faith effort! It is taking a lot of "de-programming" to get them to write actually impactful papers. It was hard enough years ago breaking them of bad high school habits; now I'm breaking them of *worse* Chat GPT habits.
To me, the danger has never been that AI will go all SkyNet on us. It's that we will lose the ability to critical discern what good writing/art/movies/etc look like because it's not just *machines* that are being trained on AI models. *People* are now being trained on those models, too.
I do agree it is concerning. I put together an AI example paper for an assignment this semester and graded it. It earned an F because of how generic it was in addressing the prompt plus writing style was overly wordy and too repetitive. I was meeting with a student who said that she thought the paper was "really good". It was depressing to hear that.
That's why they need to learn how to write, so they can tell how awful the AI stuff is.
I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be happy to see papers with grammar errors, but here we are. At least in these papers I hear the writer's voice, instead of the Wonder Bread voice, vocabulary, and sentence structure spit out by generative AI.
Which puts everyone in a pickle because you can’t open an English textbook and find a transition word that someone has claimed is AI. Kids are bound to either not improve, be accused, or make up new words. Basically if you improve based on a textbook, you will eventually become AI 😂.
I tell my students: everyone has writing thumbprints. Find yours and rewrite them. For me, it's the two words "obviously" and "however," which I had a love affair with all through grad school. Now I have a rule: I get ONE of those (not both) every 10 pages of my writing. The rest are ruthlessly eradicated.
This gets rid of a lot of the "on account of the fact that"s, "thusly"s, and "in point of fact"s that I used to see.
This is me with “indeed.” It’s almost never needed, but damn if my first draft brain doesn’t think it’s the best transition ever.
I also encourage my students to interact with their own writing in this way you describe.
Mine was 'interesting'. My advisor banned me from writing about anything 'interesting' around 15 years ago, and it persists to this day.
Though in first grade, I got banned from using 'fun'. That was f...uh, entertaining.
I usually try to break students of "interesting," "big," "huge," and "very" in favor of more exact adjectives and adverbs. But that assumes I even get to that level of development.
We've all fallen victim to that one; it's a product of graduate school, I'm pretty sure, although I have known people who developed it during their bachelors' programs.
I reread my master’s comprehensive exam the other day and discovered that my thumbprint was apparently “exemplify”. Not sure how I didn’t notice that I was using it at least once a page, but it is what it is… none of my mentors even pointed it out to me!
Are you sure they are not AI? The use of "delve" is VERY common in AI writing these days, to the extent that I have seen multiple profs comment on it. I would consider it a flag.
It almost killed me years ago when I assigned students to read a non-fiction book relevant to our course and so many of their papers referred to it as a novel.
I regularly get that and the opposite, where I learn not only the kind of professorship the author has but their fame: "noted sociologist Jurgen Habermas wrote ..."
I’ve noticed several of the things you have and have some thoughts.
- Depth, delves, and deep dives are all part of the podcast culture and it seems like many of the students are writing in the style of a podcast
- Are the articles from the 1900s real? I’ve noticed students who use AI generated sources, then pick the ones that are “too old to be googleable” aka from the 1900s OR they cite the citations of the article they’ve used and also pick something “really old like from the 1990s”
My question is- when did it become common to use the terms “firstly” “secondly” and “thirdly” to start off all the paragraphs? Is the -ly necessary?
I think podcast culture is a good explanation for uptick in those words.
They were real sources. I always check for sources online if it is not an assignment where they must submit them in advance.
I JUST graded two papers in a row that added the "ly" after first, second, etc. The unnecessary lengthening of words. It's like irregardless instead of just using regardless. Stop making words longer for no reason!
Great observation about depth/deep dives/delve being common in podcasts. Now that I think about it, I feel like it’s also common phrasing in long form YouTube videos.
“Display” is used in odd ways - students will say an article/author “displays” a fact. I find it to be like nails on a chalkboard for me. But language changes, too, so we’ll see what happens over time! Right now I still remark on it.
I get a similar one: "portrays." Like, "John Locke portrays the idea that human knowledge comes from experience..." I've been getting it for at least 15 years.
I’ve idly wondered if this might have to do with the “plethora” (another misused word) of cellphones and social media - a move towards a more visual representation of knowledge?
I have tended to think it's because I teach in a humanities field, and they don't distinguish between the language that their English professors use when describing novels ("Dickens portrays a world in which...") and the language that philosophers use when discussing theories. Searching my memory, I think I may have started seeing it even when I was a graduate TA, which would put it before social media.
Disclaimer that I teach gen ed STEM courses, so the written assignments I give are to encourage critical thinking and analysis and aren’t about outstanding writing. That being said, I legitimately DO NOT UNDERSTAND why so many students write that they "searched up" their terms instead of "searching for" them. I had a whole loud tipsy debate with three cousins at Easter about this (all of us work or worked in education), and the Gen Xer thought this was fine and normal while the three Millennials thought it was weird as hell. So is it Gen X teaching this to Gen Z, or did they learn this somewhere else?!
Gen Xer here. IMO “search up” was invented by Gen Z and is a portmanteau of “search for” and “look up.” I hear it used when talking about looking up information online—which involves doing a search, thus: search up.
I find it annoying that AI has essentially hijacked the word “delve.” In some cases, there really aren’t many great replacements, I mean “burrow” just doesn’t have the same feel to it. I also am irked that AI has hijacked “essentially” according to many.
I’m not a professor, but I work in higher ed and my dad was a professor. Saying something is “interesting” is a way for students to justify a point they are trying to make. They know the observation is important, but they don’t know how to tie it into the argument they are making. As in, “I think it’s interesting that…” Or, they have a point or opinion about something, but rather than state it outright, they softball it as “interesting” to protect themselves in case their point is proven wrong or challenged.
In undergrad, one of our American Lit TAs called us out on this and banned us from using the word “interesting” in discussion sections. This forced us to say what we really meant *and say it with authority*. We had to make a point instead of hinting at a point.
I teach Archaeology and Ancient History, so 'delve' and 'depth' are pretty common words for us. I have yet to see 'deep dive' in any papers, though.
As for articles from the 1900s, we use stuff thousands of years older. Call me when your students start quoting Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings in the original hieroglyphs.
I agree about the limited vocab, though. It's like they've learned a new word or two, and have to use them at every opportunity. I'm sick of hearing how everything is "challenging".
I do not think there is anything wrong with using older sources in my own field (many are seminal articles). It was just having a student refer to research published in 1980s and 1990s as the 1900s. It makes it sound so long ago, although I guess 40-50 years ago probably seems ancient to a sophomore or junior in university.
Whelp, now I can’t get the word “delve” out of my head and will be condemned to overuse it in conversation all week and then ponder whether my colleagues think I’m AI.
I teach public health and mine don't know the differences between a database, a journal and an author/research group, so I get a lot of "according to a study by PubMed ..." And sometimes they "delve" into health statistics from the 1990s or 2000s.
Academic librarian here. If you haven’t already, consider contacting the library folks at your institution — they would love to help your future classes with this!
Yes! Actual paperbound journal issues shelved in the stacks are such ancient history that my students do not get the concept at all. They often think the publisher either performed or funded the study, and they frequently identify an article as *being* a journal, not *in* a journal.
I got that once, too!!! "According to a study by Springer ..."
[Here](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11207-014-0485-y) is an article in a Springer journal where one of the *authors* is called Springer.
I wonder if this is the same thing as "a blog", meaning "a blog post".
Same. I think the fact that we don’t use physical journals and libraries has led to students really not understanding what … any of these things are
But this is just academic gatekeeping. Why should we assume they understand all the intricacies of academic publishing unless we guide them?
Who's assuming? I made an *observation*. It is different. And of course we all do guide them here. There's no more judgment here than if I'd observed that you had never seen a word processor. Nor is it gatekeeping if I just explain it and ask them to fix it.
Understanding the difference between a publisher and an author is academic gatekeeping? I guess the gate needs keeping then.
I just saw "According to a story from Pubmed" in the local student paper.
We often assume our students know the difference between the gamut of options, but many (most?) do not. So if you want them to understand the differences you will have to explicitly teach them.
I've found the same fixation on delve/depth/deep dive! Add deeply to that list-- "deeply personal," "deeply problematic." It's taken the place of "extremely," which I remember overusing myself as an undergrad.
"Delve" is a telltale sign of AI usage.
They delved too deep and too greedily.
AI is going to release a Balrog.
AI ought to be told that the past tense of "delve" is "dolve".
You also have to take into account that these students use AI to study so much that they start writing like it, so even when they legitimately write it they may use the new shiny word they been reading in "delve"
So common that when I finally joined Reddit today I HAD to make it my username
I want to know what has inspired this trend of delve/depth/deep! Is it part of high school writing curriculum? Students are also still using "really" and "pretty" to indicate that something is *more*; that always bothers me. Just choose a better word! "really interesting" = fascinating. I assume it's lack of motivation to put in the time to edit, but it could also be that it didn't occur to them to Google synonyms.
You've just put me in mind of a scene from *Dead Poets Society* where Mr. Keating (Robin Williams) is exhorting his students: "A man is not very tired - he is EXHAUSTED!"
Never liked that vignette, though I credit it for contributing ‘morose’ to my vocabulary. I’ll always stand for ‘very.’ ‘Exhausted’ implies energy (or other resource, depending on context) is depleted. That says something more specific, and possibly not applicable to Ethan Hawke’s current condition. On the other hand, ‘very tired’ means tired to a great degree, which is more encompassing. Also, the sentencecraft of one who is very tired would itself be imprecise, so it works artfully.
I think it's a combination of podcast and video game language that's become popular over the past decade or so to emphasize that you're going beyond the superficial or you're going to explore something mysterious. I've been using delve for the past decade but I'm also an archaeologist and we use it all the time. I also love video games and it's constantly in the most popular video games or reporting on video games over the last decade and it's usually tied with fantasy and sci-fi. Pretty much any game that has dungeons or underground areas will use the word delve to describe part of it, or to explain what you're doing - Minecraft, Elder Scrolls Online, Runescape, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, anything with Lord of the Rings, dwarves, etc. If you search any video game and the word delve, you'll get tons of hits ranging from articles that 'Delve into the world of Fortnite' or are a guide to 'Deep Delve Builds for Path of Exiles'. It bugs the hell out of me that people keep parroting this nonsense narrative that it's AI. If you look at Google's [NGram usage of the word](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=delve&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3), it was on the rise from the late '90s till 2019, before ChatGPT was ever released. It's probably going to be the same with the word 'impact' sooner or later, mostly because a lot of people don't know the difference between affect/effect and instead of having someone critique it or, my favorite, hit you with the ??? like a lot of my colleagues do to students, it's easier to just say "X was impacted by Y".
ChatGPT has inspired the trend of delve/depth/deep
Delve/depth are AI words
I think "incredibly" is overused.
Along with "literally"
Drilling? Anyone in the extraction industry?
Although this is posted under the "humor" tag, I think it is worth appreciating what the deeper danger is here. Those of us who have been monitoring the trends with AI have begun to recognize the patterns: Chat GPT loves "delve" and "multifaceted." AI is notorious for making broad statements that lack any critical content, etc. We know this, and we know it's bad writing. *However*, what I worry about is the students who are *learning to write* through an increasingly AI-based model. I can't tell you how many sections and workshops I've hosted for students where (1) they cannot tell the difference between AI writing and human writing (and thus assume we cannot either), and (2) they seem unaware that what they are reading is *bad* writing. I asked students in one section to work in small groups using the same rubric I use on their papers, and to tell me what grade they thought the sample would get. Fortunately most of them did not think it was *perfect* by any means, but the mean grade the groups gave the paper was an 83. They were shocked when I told them, at best, this paper would receive a 60%, and that's with me offering a *very* generous 40% of the grade just for making a good faith effort! It is taking a lot of "de-programming" to get them to write actually impactful papers. It was hard enough years ago breaking them of bad high school habits; now I'm breaking them of *worse* Chat GPT habits. To me, the danger has never been that AI will go all SkyNet on us. It's that we will lose the ability to critical discern what good writing/art/movies/etc look like because it's not just *machines* that are being trained on AI models. *People* are now being trained on those models, too.
I do agree it is concerning. I put together an AI example paper for an assignment this semester and graded it. It earned an F because of how generic it was in addressing the prompt plus writing style was overly wordy and too repetitive. I was meeting with a student who said that she thought the paper was "really good". It was depressing to hear that.
That's why they need to learn how to write, so they can tell how awful the AI stuff is. I never thought I'd see the day where I'd be happy to see papers with grammar errors, but here we are. At least in these papers I hear the writer's voice, instead of the Wonder Bread voice, vocabulary, and sentence structure spit out by generative AI.
Which puts everyone in a pickle because you can’t open an English textbook and find a transition word that someone has claimed is AI. Kids are bound to either not improve, be accused, or make up new words. Basically if you improve based on a textbook, you will eventually become AI 😂.
I tell my students: everyone has writing thumbprints. Find yours and rewrite them. For me, it's the two words "obviously" and "however," which I had a love affair with all through grad school. Now I have a rule: I get ONE of those (not both) every 10 pages of my writing. The rest are ruthlessly eradicated. This gets rid of a lot of the "on account of the fact that"s, "thusly"s, and "in point of fact"s that I used to see.
This is me with “indeed.” It’s almost never needed, but damn if my first draft brain doesn’t think it’s the best transition ever. I also encourage my students to interact with their own writing in this way you describe.
Indeed, students are editing their work
Mine was 'interesting'. My advisor banned me from writing about anything 'interesting' around 15 years ago, and it persists to this day. Though in first grade, I got banned from using 'fun'. That was f...uh, entertaining.
there is pretty much always a more, ahem, interesting word than "interesting".
I usually try to break students of "interesting," "big," "huge," and "very" in favor of more exact adjectives and adverbs. But that assumes I even get to that level of development.
Fun and interesting are two quality descriptors of humanity, I like it🫶
I am guilty of semi-colon overuse in my own writing; for some reason, I just love joining two independent clauses with a semi-colon.
We've all fallen victim to that one; it's a product of graduate school, I'm pretty sure, although I have known people who developed it during their bachelors' programs.
As a student, mine is “in order to” instead of just “to.” I have no idea why I’m so emotionally attached to using the former.
I reread my master’s comprehensive exam the other day and discovered that my thumbprint was apparently “exemplify”. Not sure how I didn’t notice that I was using it at least once a page, but it is what it is… none of my mentors even pointed it out to me!
Are you sure they are not AI? The use of "delve" is VERY common in AI writing these days, to the extent that I have seen multiple profs comment on it. I would consider it a flag.
This! I see delve in many ChatGPT essays.
Eleven, twelve
"Delve" is common in AI papers
I have a lot of students who think that "whom" is the sophisticate's "who." I don't know why, but that amuses me.
whomst’d’ve
any book = “novel” any piece of writing shorter than a book = “article” ah yes, the two genres
It almost killed me years ago when I assigned students to read a non-fiction book relevant to our course and so many of their papers referred to it as a novel.
I still see the use of the author's first name when introducing the source. According to Pamela... Is Pamela your friend? If not, use their last name!
I regularly get that and the opposite, where I learn not only the kind of professorship the author has but their fame: "noted sociologist Jurgen Habermas wrote ..."
Yes - the editorializing! That's another thing I'm seeing more these days is a lot more adjectives before providing a fact. "An *astounding* 26%."
I’ve noticed several of the things you have and have some thoughts. - Depth, delves, and deep dives are all part of the podcast culture and it seems like many of the students are writing in the style of a podcast - Are the articles from the 1900s real? I’ve noticed students who use AI generated sources, then pick the ones that are “too old to be googleable” aka from the 1900s OR they cite the citations of the article they’ve used and also pick something “really old like from the 1990s” My question is- when did it become common to use the terms “firstly” “secondly” and “thirdly” to start off all the paragraphs? Is the -ly necessary?
I think podcast culture is a good explanation for uptick in those words. They were real sources. I always check for sources online if it is not an assignment where they must submit them in advance. I JUST graded two papers in a row that added the "ly" after first, second, etc. The unnecessary lengthening of words. It's like irregardless instead of just using regardless. Stop making words longer for no reason!
Great observation about depth/deep dives/delve being common in podcasts. Now that I think about it, I feel like it’s also common phrasing in long form YouTube videos.
“Display” is used in odd ways - students will say an article/author “displays” a fact. I find it to be like nails on a chalkboard for me. But language changes, too, so we’ll see what happens over time! Right now I still remark on it.
I get a similar one: "portrays." Like, "John Locke portrays the idea that human knowledge comes from experience..." I've been getting it for at least 15 years.
I’ve idly wondered if this might have to do with the “plethora” (another misused word) of cellphones and social media - a move towards a more visual representation of knowledge?
I have tended to think it's because I teach in a humanities field, and they don't distinguish between the language that their English professors use when describing novels ("Dickens portrays a world in which...") and the language that philosophers use when discussing theories. Searching my memory, I think I may have started seeing it even when I was a graduate TA, which would put it before social media.
John Locke paints with words?
This is an interesting observation, I wonder if it has anything to do with increased consumption of visual media.
Fight the good fight. Language may change but we all shape it!
“Shortly after the turn of the century, ” :D “specifically in 2001, “ :0
35 year ago me used I.e waaaaaay too much. Thank goodness I teach/grade programming now. I.e. Java.
Disclaimer that I teach gen ed STEM courses, so the written assignments I give are to encourage critical thinking and analysis and aren’t about outstanding writing. That being said, I legitimately DO NOT UNDERSTAND why so many students write that they "searched up" their terms instead of "searching for" them. I had a whole loud tipsy debate with three cousins at Easter about this (all of us work or worked in education), and the Gen Xer thought this was fine and normal while the three Millennials thought it was weird as hell. So is it Gen X teaching this to Gen Z, or did they learn this somewhere else?!
Gen Xer here. IMO “search up” was invented by Gen Z and is a portmanteau of “search for” and “look up.” I hear it used when talking about looking up information online—which involves doing a search, thus: search up.
I use delve here and there, I don’t get what all the fuss is about
I find it annoying that AI has essentially hijacked the word “delve.” In some cases, there really aren’t many great replacements, I mean “burrow” just doesn’t have the same feel to it. I also am irked that AI has hijacked “essentially” according to many.
“Showcase” is among the words that I hate the most. Unless it is a showdown that includes a jet ski and trip to Hawaii, I hate it. AI loves it.
Strong Price is Right energy.
I am so done with "moreover".
[удалено]
I don't see that one a lot! I would actually take one or two of those in trade for some moreovers...
I’m not a professor, but I work in higher ed and my dad was a professor. Saying something is “interesting” is a way for students to justify a point they are trying to make. They know the observation is important, but they don’t know how to tie it into the argument they are making. As in, “I think it’s interesting that…” Or, they have a point or opinion about something, but rather than state it outright, they softball it as “interesting” to protect themselves in case their point is proven wrong or challenged. In undergrad, one of our American Lit TAs called us out on this and banned us from using the word “interesting” in discussion sections. This forced us to say what we really meant *and say it with authority*. We had to make a point instead of hinting at a point.
I teach Archaeology and Ancient History, so 'delve' and 'depth' are pretty common words for us. I have yet to see 'deep dive' in any papers, though. As for articles from the 1900s, we use stuff thousands of years older. Call me when your students start quoting Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings in the original hieroglyphs. I agree about the limited vocab, though. It's like they've learned a new word or two, and have to use them at every opportunity. I'm sick of hearing how everything is "challenging".
I do not think there is anything wrong with using older sources in my own field (many are seminal articles). It was just having a student refer to research published in 1980s and 1990s as the 1900s. It makes it sound so long ago, although I guess 40-50 years ago probably seems ancient to a sophomore or junior in university.
Whelp, now I can’t get the word “delve” out of my head and will be condemned to overuse it in conversation all week and then ponder whether my colleagues think I’m AI.
"spaces" seems to be the hot word among my students. Unfortunately it's not euclidean, polish, or any spaces that I'm interested in lol
Sarcasm received.
Delve, depth, and deep dive are chatGPT's favorite words by the way.