AI drafts are a fast first pass, but they read like a draft from a machine. Turning that into writing that sounds like you is mostly subtraction. Here is the process.
1. Break the rhythm
The biggest tell is uniform, mid-length sentences. Human writing is uneven. Drop in a short sentence. Then let the next one run long and double back on itself the way real thinking does. Read your draft aloud, and anywhere it sounds metronomic, vary it.
2. Cut the filler
Models pad. Delete phrases that add nothing:
- "It is important to note that"
- "In today's fast-paced world"
- "When it comes to"
- "At the end of the day"
The sentence almost always reads better once the padding is gone.
3. Kill the generic transitions
"Furthermore," "Moreover," and "Additionally" stacked at the front of paragraphs signal a model marching through a list. Replace them with a real connection between ideas, or just delete them and let the paragraphs stand on their own.
4. Add specifics
Generic writing is the deepest AI tell. Add a real number, a real example, a real opinion. The detail that only you would include is what makes text unmistakably human, because a model averaging the internet cannot produce your specific experience.
5. Fix the punctuation and formatting
This is the mechanical layer, and it is fast:
- Replace em dashes with commas or periods.
- Straighten smart quotes if the text is going somewhere plain.
- Strip the invisible characters that paste along with AI output.
A cleaner like textscrubr does this half in one pass and keeps your structure intact, so you can spend your effort on voice rather than hunting for a character you cannot see.
What not to do
Do not run the text through a "humanizer" that rewrites it to dodge detectors. Those tools often make the writing worse, swapping clear words for awkward synonyms, and they optimize for fooling a flawed detector rather than reaching a reader. Write for the person on the other end. Clear, specific, varied, and clean beats "undetectable" every time.
The short version
Subtract the filler, vary the rhythm, add what only you know, and clean the formatting. The draft stops sounding like a machine because you have replaced the machine's defaults with your own judgment.