When people say an email "looks like ChatGPT wrote it," they are usually reacting to a handful of patterns, not one smoking gun. Fix the patterns and the email reads like you again.
What actually makes an email look AI-written
It is rarely the vocabulary. It is the shape of the text:
- Em dashes everywhere. Chatbots love the spaced em dash for asides. Most people typing an email never reach for it.
- Perfectly balanced lists. Three items, each the same length, each starting the same way.
- Even, mid-length sentences. Human email is lumpy. One short line. Then a longer, rambling one that doubles back.
- A wrap-up sentence that restates everything. "In short, I'd love to connect and explore how we can work together."
- Invisible characters. This is the one nobody sees. Text pasted from an AI tool often carries zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces, and other Unicode that some filters and sharp-eyed readers treat as an AI fingerprint.
How to fix it
Read it out loud. If it sounds like a press release, it will read like a bot. Break the rhythm. Start a sentence with "And" or "But." Leave one thought unfinished the way you would in a real message.
Kill the em dashes. Replace them with a comma, a period, or parentheses. This single change does more than any "humanizer" tool.
Trim the symmetry. If you have a clean list of three, make it two, or fold it into a sentence.
Cut the summary line. End on the actual ask, not a recap.
Strip the hidden characters. Paste your draft into a cleaner before you send it. You cannot see zero-width spaces or non-breaking spaces by eye, so a tool is the only reliable way to catch them. textscrubr removes them in one pass and leaves your formatting intact.
A quick before-and-send checklist
- No em dashes left in the body.
- Sentence lengths vary, with at least one short punchy line.
- No restating summary at the end.
- Run it through a cleaner to remove invisible characters and double spaces.
- The greeting and sign-off sound like you, not a template.
Do those five things and the email reads as a person wrote it, because a person did. You are not faking humanity, you are removing the residue the tool left behind.