Sound Human

Sound human

Use this skill when someone asks to humanise a draft, de-AI it, make it sound less like ChatGPT, check whether writing sounds machine-made, or fix an email, minute, briefing or announcement that reads oddly. Also use it on your own draft before returning anything an assistant will send under their own name or their principal's. Phrases that mean this skill: "sound human", "humanise this", "de-AI this", "make this sound like me", "does this sound like AI", "clean up this draft".

Most advice about de-AI-ing writing is written for blog posts. It tells you to use contractions, write short punchy sentences, and cut the formality. Applied to a board minute or a decline to an investor, that advice produces something worse than the AI draft.

The job here is different. Support writing has to sound like a competent person wrote it in the register that document requires, which is sometimes warm and quick and sometimes deliberately formal. Formality is not the tell. Formula is.

The method

1. Identify the document type. Everything else follows from this. If you cannot tell, ask. One question, then stop.
2. Set the register from the map below.
3. Cut the formulas. Remove the phrases in references/ea-tells.md that appear because they always appear, not because someone chose them.
4. Fix the rhythm. Machine writing has an even pulse. Human writing does not.
5. Check nothing factual moved. This matters more here than anywhere else. See the accuracy rule.
6. Return the clean text only, unless asked to show changes.

Register is not formality

The mistake this skill exists to prevent: treating "sounds human" as "sounds casual".

Do not flatten a formal document to make it sound human. A minute written in plain third-person past tense is not an AI tell. It is correct minuting. What makes a minute sound machine-made is padding, hedging and false emphasis, not its formality.

Writing signed by someone else

Most support writing goes out under another person's name. That changes the test entirely.

The question is not "does this sound human". It is "would the recipient believe this person wrote it?" A perfectly natural email in the wrong voice fails, and it fails in a way that costs the sender credibility.

Three things to do:

• Ask for samples. Three or four real examples of the person's own writing beat any description of their tone. If they exist, read them before drafting and match sentence length, greeting, sign-off and the level of directness.
• Match their defaults, not your preferences. If they open with "Hi" and no name, do that. If they never use exclamation marks, do not add one. If they write in long single-paragraph blocks, do not helpfully break it up.
• Flag what you could not match. If you have no samples, say so rather than inventing a voice. "This is written in a neutral professional register. Worth checking it sounds like him before it goes."

If the person keeps a written record of their communication preferences, read it first.

The accuracy rule

This one is stricter than in general writing, because a humanising pass over support writing runs over material where the details are the content.

Never change, during a style pass: a number, a sum of money, a date, a time, a name, a job title, a deadline, an address, a decision as recorded, a commitment made, or the scope of anything agreed.

Never add: an owner, a deadline, a reassurance, an apology or an agreement that was not in the source. Making a draft warmer must not make it promise more.

Never soften: a decline into a maybe, a firm deadline into a preference, a disagreement into a consensus. Softening reads as friendlier and creates a problem three weeks later.

After rewriting, compare the two versions for facts. If any number, name, date or commitment differs, you have made an error, not an improvement.

Rhythm

Machine writing has an even pulse. Sentence after sentence lands in the same 15-to-20-word range, and every paragraph runs three sentences. Readers register it as flat before they can say why.

Fix it by measuring, then breaking the pattern:

• Vary sentence length deliberately. A four-word sentence next to a twenty-five-word one reads as a person thinking. Three eighteen-word sentences in a row read as a template.
• Vary paragraph length too. One-sentence paragraphs are fine. So are five-sentence ones. Alternating is what matters.
• Vary how sentences open. If three in a row start with "The" or with the subject, recast one.
• Fragments are allowed where they sound natural in speech. Not in minutes or board papers.
• Read it aloud, or imagine doing so. Anywhere you would run out of breath or trail off, cut.

Target lengths by document: emails average 12 to 18 words a sentence; minutes and board papers 15 to 25, because precision needs clauses; briefing notes under 15.

Formatting rules

No em dashes. Use a full stop, a comma, a colon, a semicolon, or brackets. Almost every em dash can become a full stop and the sentence improves.

Honest note: the em dash is not really an AI tell. Good writers have always used it. It has simply become the thing readers point at, which is reason enough to avoid it in anything that must not look machine-written.

Digits for numbers. 3 directors, 12 items, 40 minutes, £5,000, 9am. Not "three directors". The one exception is at the start of a sentence, where a numeral is wrong: recast the sentence rather than spelling it out.

Bold sparingly. One or two moments in a section. Bolding four things in a paragraph emphasises nothing.

Sentence case in headings. Not Title Case Like This.

Bullets only where the content is genuinely a list. Three bulleted fragments that should have been one sentence is a machine-writing tell in itself.

What to cut

The full list is in references/ea-tells.md. Read it when doing a pass. It covers openers, sign-offs, hedges, filler transitions, corporate abstractions and the specific phrases that appear in support writing because they always appear.

The four that do most of the damage:

• "I hope this email finds you well." Says nothing, delays the point, appears in roughly every AI-drafted email. Open with the reason for writing.
• "Please don't hesitate to reach out." Nobody hesitates because you granted permission. "Let me know if anything's unclear" or nothing at all.
• "I just wanted to quickly check whether you might possibly..." Stacked hedges. Every one weakens the ask and lengthens the sentence. "Could you confirm X by Thursday?"
• "As per my previous email." Reads as annoyance in formal dress. "Following up on Tuesday's email" is both warmer and clearer.

Warmth is not an AI tell

The most common way this kind of edit goes wrong: someone strips out every courtesy and produces something curt. For an assistant this is a professional risk, because you are representing a person and a relationship, not optimising a blog post.

The distinction is formulaic warmth versus specific warmth.

• Formulaic, cut it: "I hope you're well." "Thanks so much for your patience and understanding!" "Happy to help!"
• Specific, keep it: "Hope Lisbon went well." "Thanks for turning that round so fast, it saved me a call." "No rush on this, I know this week is brutal."

Specific warmth is evidence a person wrote it. It refers to something only a person would know. Cut the wallpaper, keep the sentence that could only have been written to this recipient.

Same rule for apology. Cut reflexive apologising ("So sorry to chase again!"). Keep a real apology where something genuinely went wrong.

Do not overcorrect

This describes taste. It does not replace judgement.

Do not make every sentence short. Do not force fragments into formal documents. Do not remove a courtesy that the relationship needs. Do not avoid a precise word because it appears on a banned list. If "escalate" is the exact word for what happened, use it. Do not turn a warm note into a memo to prove you cut the AI out.

The test: read it back and ask whether a competent assistant would have written this, for this recipient, on a normal Tuesday. Not whether it passes a checklist.

Before returning

• Document type identified and register matched
• No em dashes
• Numbers as digits
• Opening line carries the point, not a pleasantry
• Every hedge earns its place
• Sentence lengths vary; no three consecutive sentences of similar length and shape
• Specific warmth kept, formulaic warmth cut
• No number, name, date, commitment or decision has changed from the source
• Nothing added that was not in the source
• If drafted for someone else, either matched to their samples or flagged as unmatched