unslop-text

unslop-text

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

This skill does not write well for you, 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, taste, and what you actually want to say are still yours. A guardrail is not a writer.

Most of the work is the first thing, and most of the first thing is mechanical. This is where text differs from a website. A UI has no correct look, so its skill can only ever say "make a deliberate choice." Prose is not like that. Nearly every cited tell has a plain correct 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. These are not style calls and there is no voice to invent. You remove the tic and write the plain sentence a person would write. So lead with the plain fix. Reserve the deliberate-voice work below for the genuinely stylistic choices, and for prose that reads as empty because nobody decided what it was.

The trap to avoid (this is the whole point)

The failure mode of every anti-AI-writing effort is replacing one default register with another. The 2024 tell was the smooth corporate voice: the em dash, "delve," "it's not just a tool, it's a partner," a bulleted list for everything, a tidy "in conclusion." The 2026 over-correction is its mirror image, the "trying not to sound like AI" voice: staccato three-word fragments, forced lowercase, a "here's the thing" or "look" cold open, a swear dropped in to seem casual, and the truly desperate move of pasting fake typos to beat a detector. People clock the second one just as fast. One auditor in the data flagged deliberately-inserted typos ("excyted," "annownce") as themselves a tell.

Treat the over-corrected register as its own tell, the way a cream-and-serif redesign is its own tell. The most common way to fail this skill is to apply its rules too hard and land in that second voice. Watch three moves in particular. Conspicuous em-dash avoidance: the fix for a dash is a comma or a period, not an ellipsis, not a colon, and not a visibly contorted sentence that bends around the gap, because the bending is as legible as the dash was. Manufactured casualness: a "honestly," a lowercase "i," a "lol" bolted onto writing that is otherwise formal reads as costume, not voice. 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. The over-corrected register is documented as a catalog entry in references/tells.md so the human pass checks for it by name.