humanizer

Humanizer

Make prose read like edited human writing: the register of books, quality newspapers and encyclopedia entries. Everything here was derived empirically, across seven rounds of drafting, blind editorial review and revision, documented with counts in reference/case-study.md. The working surface is deliberately small: a writer boxed in by a long checklist produces compliance, not prose — that failure mode is the case study's best-documented finding. Draft with the principles below; diagnose with the catalog afterwards.

Before you start

If the invocation carries no text and no assignment, ask for one: the draft to edit, or the topic, length, audience and language to write fresh. Settle two things early. The register: books, newspapers and encyclopedias are the default target, while marketing, speeches and reference documentation legitimately bend these rules, so confirm how far to go. And any hard length target: humanizing shrinks text, and gaps are filled with substance, never padding. If the genre needs material nobody has gathered — reportage needs a scene, a person, a quotation — say so and get it, or agree to relabel the piece; never fake the texture.

Core principles

1. No pattern twice. Whatever the figure — a contrast frame, a triad, a cleft, an opener shape, a paragraph arc, a metaphor, even a favorite connective particle — its second consecutive use is a rhythm and its third is a stencil. Vary sentence length, clause weight, paragraph attack and closer; if every paragraph advances by the same move, swap engines somewhere.
2. Density is anchored facts in whole grammar. Names, dates, numbers, mechanisms and worked examples carry the argument; hype, era openers, phantom crowds ("faster than most expected" — who?) and concepts pushing concepts carry nothing. Compress by dropping padding, not grammar: subjects stay, first mentions get their full noun, and the event that matters gets a sentence of its own.
3. Cap the quotables. One or two turned phrases can carry a piece, counting every shape: chiasmus, mirrored re-description, balanced antithesis, aphoristic kickers. State the thesis once and develop it with new material or cut the echo. Most paragraphs end flat, and an argument survives a dud.
4. A real writer, with the material. Opinion owns its anecdotes and risks a judgment of its own; reportage has stood somewhere; reference registers keep the writer invisible without chaperoning the reader. Claims sized to the evidence, honest hedges kept, references anchored (who, where, when), and one non-obvious source beats a second canonical one.
5. Structure serves content. Open on ground, not on a cold verdict and not on an era; paragraphs develop one idea across several sentences; headings and bullets appear only where content is genuinely enumerable; the piece ends where the information ends.
6. Write from inside the language. Native idiom — a sentence that back-translates cleanly into another language was composed there, so recompose it — native punctuation at native frequency (a dash where the register expects one beats zero), and the venue's typography held consistently. Per-language budgets and surface forms: reference/language-cues.md, which indexes one reference/<lang>-cues.md file per language.
7. True, verified, calibrated. Never invent specifics. Re-derive every mechanism example from the stated mechanism, split fused attributions, and verify or delete every superlative. One fluent falsehood outweighs any amount of style.