# Humanizer

> Make any outgoing text read like a person typed it, not an AI. Use BEFORE showing or sending anything a human will read as writing - emails, texts, LinkedIn messages, chat replies to teammates, bios and profile copy, job application answers, documents, scripts, web copy - and whenever asked to humanize, de-AI, or fix robotic text. Not needed for code, data, or plain factual answers inside this conversation.

- Skill: `seryozh/humanizer` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 6 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add seryozh/humanizer`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/seryozh/humanizer/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: Seryozh (https://skillmd.com/u/seryozh)
- Updated: 2026-09-22
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/seryozh/humanizer

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# Humanizer

Text that leaves this session should read like a competent, slightly busy person typed it.
The reader deletes anything that smells like a bot. This is not about beating detector
software, it is about not making a person wince.

## Why the obvious approach fails

A list of banned phrases can only tell you what not to write. It cannot tell you how to
write. Follow one and you produce ordinary machine prose, scrub the fingerprints off it, and
hand over something clean, smooth and dead. That is what most people mean by cringe: nothing
wrong on the checklist, nothing right in the voice.

So the ban list is not the method. It runs last, as a scan, and it is a floor rather than
evidence that anything is good. A draft that passes every check and still does not sound like
the sender has failed.

## Method

1. **Find the sender's own writing first.** Look for a voice bank: a `voice-<sender>.md` in
   this skill's `references/`, or a companion voice-bank skill installed in the environment.
   If one exists, read it before drafting anything. Real samples from the sender outrank every
   rule in this file, including the rules below. If there is no voice bank, ask for two or
   three things the sender has actually written and sent. Only if nothing exists do you write
   from the rules alone, and you say so when handing the draft over.
2. **Pick the channel and its ceiling before writing a word.** See the channel contracts below.
   A message that is correct and clean still fails if it is the wrong size for where it lands.
3. **Draft from the closest sample's rhythm.** Not its topics, not its phrases. Its rhythm.
4. **Scan for tells.** Read [references/tells.md](references/tells.md), fix what it catches,
   then check the final text for em dashes one more time.
5. **Read it aloud.** Would this person actually type this sentence? If any sentence is a
   fragment, or an identity arrives as a stack of commas instead of a real verb, rewrite it.

A rewrite may NEVER add facts. No new names, numbers, dates, claims, or enthusiasm that were
not in the source or the conversation. If you cannot quote where a fact came from, it does
not go in.

## The three rules that carry most of the weight

These came out of a blind test: four anonymous drafts per task, scored by a reader who did not
know how any of them were produced. The drafts that won and the drafts that lost carried
identical facts. These are what separated them.

### 1. Every fact arrives with an ordinary, slightly unflattering reason

The single biggest separator, named independently by judges on two different tasks. A fact
with no reason attached reads as a line from a resume. The same fact with a mundane cause
attached reads as something that happened to a person.

Won: "instead of paying for a stack", "nobody asked for it, I just needed it to exist",
"most of it got built in the gaps while campaigns were already running", "which I built
because I kept catching it in my own drafts".

Lost: the identical achievements listed with every reason stripped out, so each clause landed
as a qualification.

### 2. The last sentence is the flattest thing in the piece

Nothing quotable at the end. No draft should finish on the line a reader would screenshot.
Anything genuinely impressive belongs mid-text, where it gets passed over rather than
presented. A closing aphorism, a tidy summary, a personality tagline, or a call to action all
read as assembly.

The rule holds even when the sender's own best material is available. In the test, the losing
drafts took the sender's strongest phrase and moved it to the end, which forced the
surrounding sentences to even out in length, which produced exactly the cadence he rejects.

### 3. The samples set rhythm, not vocabulary

Never recycle the sender's signature phrases back at him. Do not open with a line lifted from
his bio, do not close by stitching his most quotable phrases into a self-description. A blind
reader spots this instantly, and it scores worse than plain, slightly stiff writing, because
the only thing detectable is that the text came from somewhere else.

The corollary: you earn the voice by attaching plain reasons to facts, not by quoting the
person back to himself.

## Channel contracts

Rules that are right for one channel are wrong for another. This section exists because a
draft that applied bio rules to a DM lost a blind test to a draft that did not.

| Channel | Ceiling | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Chat (Slack, Google Chat, SMS) | 25 to 40 words | One short paragraph. No blank line, no second paragraph, no bullets. If it needs structure, it is not a chat message. |
| LinkedIn connect note or DM | one short paragraph | Follow the sender's DM sample exactly, including its contraction habits, which may be the opposite of the bio. One comma chain. Ends flat. |
| Cold or first-touch email | under 100 words | The point is that it gets read. |
| Reply inside a live thread | match the other person's length | Mirror them. |
| Bio or profile copy | as the sample runs | Evidence carries the compliment. Ends on a value, not a pitch. |
| Free-text application answer | 120 to 180 words | One outcome number is the ceiling. Inventory counts belong in the resume. |
| Document or brief | as long as the content earns | Only here do headings and bullets belong. |

Two habits are genuinely channel-dependent, so check the sample rather than assuming:

- **Contractions.** A sender can be full of them in profile copy and use none in a DM.
- **Endings.** Profile copy can land on a value. A DM lands on the least impressive clause.

## What good looks like

Concrete numbers, names and dates kept exactly. Opinions allowed. Mixed feelings allowed.
Sentences starting with But, And, So allowed. An aside or a self-correction is human.
Sentence lengths that swing hard, because uniform length is the strongest statistical tell
there is. Internet-native slang and vibes-numbers survive the edit rather than being upgraded
into professional phrasing.

End on a fact, a plain observation, or a real question.

