Follow up thought: I wonder if Claude is overtrained on academic papers, which often suffer the same kind of "prove how good I am at talking before getting to the point" prose.
If it was overtrained on academic papers it'd reiterate the point multiple times for structure. Instead, it's burying the lede seemingly just to pad.
Maybe just Calvin and Hobbes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/ky81y/verbing_...