this is real

How to spot it

Look at what follows the assertion. A line like "this is real, and it is getting worse" is a plain assertion that something exists, followed by a clause that pushes straight past it, and the assertion is almost never the contested half. Nobody in the room was arguing that the backlog did not exist, or that the burnout was imaginary. So the sentence opens on ground no one was fighting over, and the writer collects the sound of a hard concession without having conceded anything.

The test is the clause after "and", whether or not a comma comes before it. Cover the assertion with your hand and read only what follows. If the clause hands you something a doubtful reader could go and check, such as a count or a date, then the setup in front of it was fair. If it restates the claim at a higher volume, the sentence has insisted twice and proved nothing. What usually follows is a phrase along the lines of "keeps growing" or "is not going away", and neither of those is a measurement. They are the first claim wearing a second coat.

Before you cut, look one step back up the page. A writer who is summing up has usually put the evidence down first, the dates and the names a doubtful reader would ask for, and the assertion gathers them into a single line. When neither the lines before it nor the clause after it give a reader anything to check, the declaration is arguing with a doubt the writer invented so the paragraph would have something to overcome.

Why models overdo it

A long history of sincere use has made an insistence that some difficulty is genuine a likely continuation of almost any topic sentence, and a model picks its next words by weighing exactly that kind of likelihood. The phrase costs nothing to produce, and it buys the tone of a writer who has thought hard and is now leveling with you. Tone is cheap. The evidence that used to earn the tone is expensive, and nothing in the process is keeping track of which one the sentence actually paid for.

For the same reason, these lines arrive in clusters rather than alone. Once a passage has taken the posture of leveling with a reader, the same move is available for the next paragraph and the one after it, and no step asks whether the second use has earned what the first one borrowed. Orwell priced the trade decades before any of this existed. A ready-made phrase saves a writer the trouble of finding a sharper one, and the saving comes straight out of the meaning. Generated prose takes that saving every time it is offered, which is why a page can carry the posture of hard-won honesty from beginning to end and never once arrive at a fact.

When it's fine

None of this makes the construction dishonest by nature, and it is older and far more useful than its current reputation suggests. It earns its place when the evidence sits right beside it, in the lines before it or in the clause after it, because then the assertion gathers up a record instead of standing in for one.

George W. Bush's 2008 World Freedom Day proclamation says that "evil is real and must be confronted," and the clause after "and" is an instruction, not a count. The sentence passes anyway, because the paragraph just before it has already done the work. It describes the Berlin Wall as a barrier that isolated the victims of totalitarian power, quotes Reagan's challenge, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," and gives the date the wall came down, November 9, 1989. A reader who doubts the claim has somewhere to go and look. Barack Obama's 2009 address to Congress is the harder case. A few lines before "The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere," he tells the chamber, "You don't need to hear another list of statistics," and names losses in the second person, such as "the job you thought you'd retire from but now have lost." None of those carries a count or a date a doubter could look up. The line works in that room because every listener already lived the evidence, and a page written for strangers cannot lean on that.

Your own sentence can stand when the count or the date sits in the clause after it or in the lines just before it. When neither place holds one, trim the sentence down to the count.

Where it comes from

Two ancestries meet in the same sentence. The first is a figure classical rhetoric named a long time ago: auxesis, the arrangement of clauses so that each lands with more force than the one before it. This construction is one of its smallest everyday shapes, a flat claim with a coordinated clause stacked on top of it.

The second ancestry is colloquial and much more recent. Sincere affirmations that life or joy is real have a long place in verse. Andrew Francis Lockhart opened a stanza in 1918 on the line "For life is real, and so much joy." In the early 2010s the construction turned knowingly ironic online, where people used "the struggle is real" as a joke about small inconveniences. The irony eventually wore off into a general-purpose way of sounding convinced about almost anything. A model trained on both inherited the shape along with the tone, but not the occasions that once justified them.