PhD in natural language processing, with years spent building NLP applications end to end. Moe works on text analysis: lexical and syntactic structure, and what separates machine-generated prose from human prose statistically. He has been experimenting with computational linguistics since the early days of NLTK, spaCy and WordNet, and still writes most of his tooling in Python.
Turnitin publishes no acceptable similarity percentage, and institutions set their own guidance instead. This post explains what actually drives a high or low score, why quoted material and reference lists inflate it without anything being wrong, and how to read the match breakdown behind the number rather than the number itself.
A spell checker reads letters, not meaning, so its and it's, a plural and a possessive, and a decade with a stray apostrophe all sail through clean. Here are the rules that catch what spell check cannot: singular possessives ending in s, plural possessives, joint ownership, and the marks that should never appear at all.
A similarity score and an AI score answer different questions, so a paper can score low on one and high on the other without either number being wrong. What each measures, what triggers it, and what a high number does and does not prove.
A semicolon joins two independent clauses of equal weight. A colon announces that what follows explains or completes what came before. Here is the structural difference, where each belongs in academic prose, and the one style question that splits APA from Chicago.
Raising perplexity and burstiness on purpose usually just means writing better: varying sentence length, mixing clause structures, and choosing the word that actually fits instead of the one that merely scans. Concrete before-and-after examples, plus where this stops being craft and starts being a bad idea.
APA requires the serial comma without exception, and so do Chicago and MLA. Here is what each style guide actually mandates, why the comma exists structurally, and the cases where leaving it out changes what a sentence means.