CONCEPT
Person-Less Prose
Mark Marino's term for text devoid of individual presence: 'complete sentences of similar length and structure,' technically competent, utterly voiceless — the characteristic output of
AI-saturated writing environments.
Person-less prose is writing from which the person has been removed. Not through violence but through the efficiency of processes that produce competent text faster than any human can produce voiced text. The term was introduced by composition scholar Mark Marino in 2025 research on students who had been exposed to ChatGPT. Marino found that students had 'developed some skill at imitating the cadence and rhythm of ChatGPT,' producing work characterized by 'complete sentences of similar length and structure' — technically correct, structurally sound, rhetorically adequate, and devoid of the irreducible presence
Peter Elbow called
voice. The phenomenon is not unique to AI; traditional academic writing often exhibits the same voicelessness, produced by students trained to suppress their own thinking in favor of formulaic structures. But AI accelerates and intensifies
the pattern, making voiceless competence available at scale and eliminating the institutional
friction that once made voice development unavoidable.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Person-less prose is the precise negation of everything Elbow championed. It