Break the metronome

AI writes in a metronome rhythm: medium sentence, medium sentence, medium sentence, medium sentence. Your eye goes numb by the third one. Human writing stutters. It sprints, then stops. One short sentence can reset a whole paragraph.

Take a paragraph and count the words in each sentence. If they’re all between 15 and 22 words, that’s your problem. Split one sentence in half. Join two short ones with “and.” Let a fragment land. “It works.” is a complete sentence, and sometimes it’s the best one on the page.

Before: “AI writing tools can help writers produce content more quickly and efficiently. They are useful for many different types of writing tasks and can save a significant amount of time.”

After: “AI tools write fast. That’s the whole pitch — and the whole problem. Speed was never what your draft was missing.”

Same meaning. One of them sounds like a person.

Delete the phrasebook

AI drafts lean on a small set of stock phrases, and readers have learned to spot them in half a second. You don’t need a detector to find them — you need a delete key and a replacement habit.

None of these phrases are crimes. They’re just fog. Every one you replace with something specific makes the draft a little less interchangeable with every other AI draft on the internet.

Give every sentence a real subject

AI loves sentences with nobody in them. “It is widely believed that good writing matters.” Believed by whom? “There are many ways to improve your draft.” Whose ways? Sentences with abstract subjects feel empty because they are empty — there’s no person doing anything.

Fix it by putting a person, a tool, or a thing in the subject slot. “Most editors will tell you good writing matters” has a pulse. “You can improve a draft three ways” has a reader in it. The moment a sentence has someone in it, it stops sounding generated.

Add one specific detail per paragraph

This is the highest-leverage fix on this list. AI can’t invent your specifics, so specifics are the fastest way to make a draft unmistakably yours.

For every paragraph, add one concrete thing: a number, a name, a moment, a measurement. “I cut 40% of the draft.” “My editor, Priya, flagged it.” “Last Tuesday’s call.” One detail per paragraph is enough — it compounds across a whole article until the piece could only have been written by someone who was actually there.

A draft with no specifics is a draft anyone could have written. That’s the definition of robotic.

Start sentences the way people actually talk

AI almost never starts a sentence with “And,” “But,” or “So.” Humans do it constantly. It’s one of the cheapest humanizing moves there is, and it costs nothing.

“And that’s the part most guides skip.” “But the tool can’t do the thinking for you.” “So I stopped using it.” These aren’t grammar errors — they’re how people actually speak, and readers relax when they hear their own speech patterns on the page. Add two or three across a draft and the whole thing loosens up.

Swap abstractions for verbs

AI writes in nouns. “The implementation of the strategy resulted in an improvement in performance.” Nobody talks like that. People say what happened: “We tried it. It worked. Traffic doubled.”

Scan for the heavyweight nouns — implementation, utilisation, optimisation, facilitation — and ask what verb is hiding inside each one. “Use” instead of “utilisation.” “Try” instead of “implementation.” “Fix” instead of “optimisation.” Every abstraction you turn into a verb makes the sentence shorter and the writer more visible.

Cut the throat-clearing

AI drafts love to warm up before saying anything. “When it comes to writing, there are many important factors to consider.” “Writing is a skill that has been valued throughout history.” These sentences say nothing, and they sit at the top of the draft where the reader decides whether to keep going.

Delete the first sentence of every paragraph and read what’s left. Most of the time, the paragraph gets better. The real opening was always the second sentence — the one that actually said something. If a sentence could open any article about any topic, it shouldn’t open yours.

Read it aloud and mark where you go flat

Your ears catch what your eyes forgive. AI writing has a rhythm — smooth, even, and slightly sleepy. When you read it out loud, the flat spots announce themselves: you’ll hear your own voice going on autopilot, and that’s exactly where your reader would too.

Read the whole draft aloud once, pen in hand. Every time you stumble, rush, or go monotone, mark the passage. Those marks are your real editing list — not a detector score, not a tool’s suggestions. The passages where your voice flattens are the passages that still belong to the machine.

End with a sentence only you would write

The last line is what the reader carries away, so make it yours. Not a summary, not a call to action the AI generated — a sentence with an opinion in it.

“I’d rather publish one honest paragraph than ten polished ones nobody remembers.” “The tool writes fast. You write true. That’s the division of labour.” A closing line with a point of view is the clearest signal in the whole piece that a person was here.