human-writing

human-writing

Read this first, because the most common misunderstanding sinks the whole thing.

This skill does not supply taste, and it has no house style. It does two narrow things. It removes the specific cues that make text read as machine-written, and where the text reads as AI because nobody ever chose a voice, it forces a deliberate one. Argument and judgment stay with the author. A guardrail is not a writer.

Most of the work is mechanical, and the plain fix is usually correct. Nearly every cited tell has a fix that needs no taste at all: the em dash becomes a comma or a period, delve into becomes look at, the sycophantic opener gets cut, the as an AI boilerplate gets deleted, the "in conclusion" recap goes. Lead with the plain fix. Reserve the voice work for the genuinely stylistic calls, and for prose that reads as empty because nobody decided what it was.

The trap to avoid (this is the whole point)

Every anti-AI-writing effort fails the same way: it replaces one default register with another. The 2024 tell was the smooth corporate voice. The 2026 over-correction is its mirror image, the "trying not to sound like AI" voice: staccato fragments, forced lowercase, a "here's the thing" cold open, a swear dropped in to seem casual, and the truly desperate move of pasting fake typos to beat a detector. Readers clock the second one just as fast.

Treat the over-corrected register as its own tell. Three moves in particular. Conspicuous em-dash avoidance: the fix for a dash is a comma or a period, not an ellipsis and not a sentence visibly contorted around the gap, because the bending is as legible as the dash was. Manufactured casualness: a "honestly", a lowercase "i", a "lol" bolted onto otherwise formal writing reads as costume. And rhythm that is uniform in a new way: all-short sentences are as mechanical as all-medium ones. Evenness is the tell, whichever length it settles on.

A tell is an unspecified default, not a banned word. If the writing genuinely calls for a formal register, or the author genuinely loves the em dash, that is not slop. Honor the escape hatches (see The scanner). Full catalog: references/over-correction.md.