Fluency was never the prize. It was the entry fee. Five years ago a clean paragraph signaled competence. Today it signals the opposite — that nobody was home when the words arrived. I keep noticing it in my own drafts. The model gives me three sentences that flow like rain. I read them again and I cannot find the writer. The cadence is fine. The diction is fine. The thought sits behind a layer of polite glass that no thumbprint will scratch. So I started leaving the seams visible. A clause that turns where I actually turned. A repetition I should have edited out. The wrong word kept on purpose because the right word was already a small lie about what I meant. This is not a stylistic choice. It is an authentication protocol. When everything else can be generated, the unforgettable detail of having been there — having paused at exactly this point — becomes the only signature that holds. A generation of writers is about to discover that fluency was never the prize. It was the entry fee.…