Edit AI drafts so they stop sounding like drafts
The six habits that give it away, and the order to remove them in.
Before you start
- A draft you generated
- Ten minutes
What you will be able to do
- Recognise the six structural tells of generated prose
- Cut the padding without losing the argument
- Put specificity back where the model hedged
AI-assisted writing rarely reads badly. It reads flat — competent, evenly weighted, and strangely reluctant to commit to anything.
The good news is that the tells are consistent, which means editing them out is a checklist rather than a talent.
Delete the opening and the closing
The first and last paragraphs are almost always restating the brief.
Generated pieces open by announcing the topic and close by summarising what they just said. Cut both and start at the first sentence carrying actual information.
This alone removes roughly a fifth of the words and most of the "in today's fast-paced world" register.
Break the rhythm
Every paragraph the same length is the loudest tell there is.
Generated text has an unnervingly even texture: three or four sentences per paragraph, all of similar length, each covering one tidy point.
Human writing is lumpy. Merge two paragraphs, split another, leave one at a single line. The content need not change at all — the unevenness is what reads as a person.
Remove the hedges and the triads
Delete "it is worth noting", and cut every list of three back to the one that matters.
Search for the standard hedges — "it is important to note", "can be a valuable tool", "plays a crucial role" — and delete the sentence containing them. They almost never carry information.
Then find the lists of three adjectives and pick one. The rule of three is a real device; used in every paragraph it is a verbal tic.
- Replacing a hedge with a stronger claim you have not checked. Deleting is safer than upgrading.
Put in one thing only you know
A number, a name, or something that happened. This is the whole game.
The unfixable weakness of a generated draft is that it contains nothing specific to you. Add one concrete detail per section: a figure from your own work, an example from a real project, a caveat you learned the hard way.
This is the edit that cannot be automated, and it is the reason the draft was worth starting from rather than worth publishing.
Do these in order and a draft goes from obviously generated to ordinarily written in about ten minutes. The last one is what makes it yours.
Common questions
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