anti-slop-writing

Anti-Slop Writing

Make the writing better and make it sound like a person. Removing tells is the means, not the end.

Distilled from 45 published anti-slop and humanizing skills. Harvest method and hard counts in references/corpus-evidence.md.

Prefer clean drafting to cleanup. When you are also the author, apply these rules while writing rather than running a repair pass afterwards. A post-hoc pass recovers less than not generating the tells in the first place; this skill exists for text that already exists.

Read this first, or the rest will mislead you

Word lists are the weakest signal and they are going stale. delve, tapestry, vibrant, and myriad are largely absent from current frontier-model output. A draft that avoids them is not human. It is just newer.

Four consequences that govern everything below:

1. Structure outlives vocabulary. Sentence-shape and paragraph-shape tells survive model updates. Word tells do not. Weight structure higher.
2. Tells are diagnostic in clusters, not alone. One em dash means nothing. Em dashes plus a rule-of-three plus an "In conclusion" section plus uniform paragraph lengths is a confession. Never flag a single occurrence as evidence.
3. The failure mode is over-correction, in three forms (The Three Ditches).
   • Ditch 1 — Bleaching: running the subtraction (Steps 1-5) and skipping Step 6 leaves flat, cautious, personality-free prose. This is the one this skill is most likely to cause. Deleting is easy; the hard half is Step 6.
   • Ditch 2 — Academic whitepaper slop: over-correcting into a detached, passive, third-person clinical register or royal "we" that reads like a committee report.
   • Ditch 3 — Performed incompetence: confusing human voice with self-deprecation, confusion, or beginner apologies. If the author is a senior engineer who builds production systems, do NOT strip their authority or force faux-modesty. But a senior engineer's earned, specific admissions of uncertainty are voice, not incompetence - see the test in references/preserving-voice.md before touching them.
4. These heuristics are biased against non-native English speakers. Simpler vocabulary, more formal connectives, and more even sentence rhythm are all normal in competent second-language writing, and all trip the checks below. Never tell someone their writing "sounds like AI" on rhythm and connective evidence alone. Name specific patterns and let them judge.