in today’s fast-paced world

How to spot it

Cover the first sentence with your hand and read the second one. If nothing is missing, the first sentence was never carrying anything. That is the test. A stock opener is easier to catch than most writing habits, because the sentence is not wrong, only removable. "In today’s fast-paced world" is the specimen everybody knows, but the family is much larger than that one phrase. A piece can open on a realm, on an era, on a farewell to days now gone, on a promise about what the guide you are about to read will walk you through, or on a question asking whether you have ever wondered. Every one of them announces that writing is about to happen. None of them has said anything yet.

A second reading helps when the first is close. Look at the sentence after the opener and ask what the opener promised. An honest opening line makes a narrow promise that the next sentence pays: name the era and then date it, name the realm and then tell me one true thing about it. A reflex opening makes a promise so wide that any second sentence at all would satisfy it, and that width is the giveaway. "When it comes to" can be followed by anything. So can a line welcoming you to a deep dive. The openers that get flagged are the ones whose scope is set to everything, because a writer holding an actual fact would have led with the fact.

Why models overdo it

The first sentence is the hardest sentence in any piece, because nothing has been said yet and the writer is committing to a direction before knowing whether the direction holds. A person solves that by going away and coming back. A model has no away. It is producing the opening word of the opening sentence with nothing behind it except the shape of everything it has read that looked like this piece, and a stock opener is the likeliest way to begin that shape.

Then there is what the training material was. Two decades of web writing were paid for by search, and search rewarded pages that sounded authoritative about a subject before they had reached it. That produced an enormous quantity of prose whose first sentence is a warm-up and whose second sentence is where the article actually starts. A model trained on that inherits the warm-up along with everything else. That inheritance explains why the habit lands at exactly the wrong moment: it arrives at the point of least information and most pressure to sound like the piece has already begun.

The cost is small, which is why nothing corrects it. A stock opener commits to no fact that a later sentence has to support. It cannot be contradicted, because it never claimed anything. A writer pays for an opening line by owing the reader a piece worth the delay. A model owes nothing, so it keeps the line.

When it's fine

A sweeping first line survives whenever the next sentence pays for it, and all three openings below get paid.

Justice Kennedy opens the history section of Obergefell v. Hodges on the widest ground available: "Since the dawn of history, marriage has transformed strangers into relatives, binding families and societies together." That is as sweeping as an opening gets, and it is honest, because the paragraph immediately spends its credit. Confucius on marriage as the foundation of government. Cicero on marriage as the first bond of society. The sweep is not decoration there. It is the claim the whole case turns on, and the lines underneath it are the receipts.

Stephen Foster earns his opener a different way. The two lines under it open on the same word: the friends gone from the cotton fields, then gone from the earth, and by the fourth line nothing is left of them but voices calling his name. Cover "Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay" and the verse loses the shape it is built on, because the first line starts the farewell that every line after it extends. George W. Bush's "without further ado" at a turkey pardon earns its place because a ceremony really does want a pause before the punchline, and nobody in the room mistakes the pause for the joke.

So the vocabulary is never the problem. Test your own opening line by naming what the next sentence pays it back with; when the next sentence is where you actually started, start the piece there.

Where it comes from

Classical rhetoric had a name for the opening of a speech and a job for it to do. The Greeks called it the prooimion. The Romans called it the exordium, and the particular move of winning a specific room before the argument began was captatio benevolentiae, the capture of goodwill. It was never supposed to be a phrase. It was supposed to be a calculation about the people in front of you, about what they already believe and what they suspect of you before you have said a word. Quintilian devotes the opening of a book to it and keeps insisting that an exordium be built for this audience and this case, which is another way of saying that a reusable one is a contradiction in terms.

The formula outlived the calculation. By 1946, when Orwell wrote about ready-made phrases and dying metaphors, the charge was that stock language spares a writer the work of composing a thought, and the opening line is where that work is hardest and the sparing is most tempting. Editors gave the same thing a plainer and less flattering name: throat-clearing, a warm-up written for the writer who is working up to the point rather than for the reader who has already arrived. Newsroom style guides put cliches on the cut list, and the opening line is where they gather.

Then search engines started paying by the page, and supply went vertical. The realm, the era, the ever-evolving landscape, the fast-paced world: these are not new sentences. They are old sentences reproduced at a volume no earlier century could have managed, and that is the only thing about them that changed. The device is twenty-three centuries old and perfectly good. The frequency is what gives it away.