Artificial Epanorthosis: Why large language models overuse a classical rhetorical figure, and how to mitigate it
A rhetorical figure that Cicero and Quintilian catalogued two thousand years ago reappears, systematically, in the text of large language models: epanorthosis, the self-correction of the specimen «This is not a course. It is a journey of transformation». This essay argues that the overuse is a trained disposition, driven mainly by a training distribution rich in promotional prose and by preference tuning (RLHF) that rewards confident, emphatic phrasing; the left-to-right nature of generation is an amplifier rather than the root cause. Building on evidence that models diverge from human rhetorical style, and on Fontanier's classification of epanorthosis as a figure of thought, it sets out ...
| Authors | Federico Boggia |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 July 2026 |
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