# Natural Writing

> Use when asked to humanize text, remove AI tells, check whether text reads as AI-generated, or draft prose that must not sound AI-written.

- Skill: `vivswan/natural-writing` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 7 files)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add vivswan/natural-writing`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/vivswan/natural-writing/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- License: SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE.md
- Author: Vivswan (https://skillmd.com/u/vivswan)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/vivswan/natural-writing

---


# Natural writing

Produce prose that avoids the documented signs of AI writing, based on [Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing). That page is a field guide for *detecting* AI text; this skill inverts it into rules for *not producing* those patterns.

One pattern alone can be fine. The goal is prose where the patterns don't cluster and nothing reads generated.

Scope: this skill is a guideline, not law. Skimmability for the reader outranks any style rule in it (short front-loaded paragraphs, no text blobs, examples first); accuracy and reference-integrity rules always bind. Under that house standard, bold-label bullets and sparing keyword bolds are sanctioned formatting: the bold and bullet cautions in this skill apply to prose written for external readers, not to this repo's own skill docs.

## When to apply

- "humanize this text" / "make this sound less like AI" / "remove the AI tells"
- "does this read as AI-generated?"
- Drafting or rewriting any prose a human will read: documentation, READMEs, articles, blog posts, reports, emails, announcements, PR descriptions
- Any writing task where the user cares about tone, voice, or naturalness

## Source of truth

The catalog of signs changes over time (models change; the community adds new tells). Prefer the live page, fall back to the bundled snapshot:

1. Live: fetch <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing> (raw wikitext: `https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing&action=raw`). Do this when auditing text for AI tells, when the user asks for a thorough pass, or when the bundled snapshot looks stale for the topic at hand.
2. Snapshot: [references/signs-catalog.md](references/signs-catalog.md) is a distilled copy of the full page, reorganized as writing rules. Use it as the working checklist for every invocation; it is enough when offline or for routine drafting.

Snapshot last synced: 2026-08-26, from page revision 1371415133 (2026-08-26T08:17:42Z). See "Maintaining the snapshot" below for how to update it.

[references/words-to-avoid.md](references/words-to-avoid.md) lists the words and phrases the page flags, organized for scanning, plus ready-made grep commands for the mechanical checks.

## Workflow

### 1. Load the rules

Read `references/signs-catalog.md` in full. For audits or thorough requests, also fetch the live page and note any signs not yet in the snapshot.

### 2. Pick the mode

- **Draft**: writing new text.
- **Rewrite**: revising existing text. Preserve the author's facts and voice, and the structure where sound; strip only the tells. Do not inject new claims.
- **Audit**: the user wants an assessment, not edits. Report which signs appear, where, with brief quotes. Mind the false-positive caveats in the catalog (§9): formal prose or perfect grammar alone proves nothing. Do not edit unless asked.

### 3. Write or edit

Apply the full catalog. The highest-value rules:

1. **State facts plainly**, with *is/are/has/was*. Not "serves as", "stands as", "boasts", "features", "marks", "represents", or "refers to" openings.
2. **Cut inflated significance**: "pivotal moment", "testament to", "underscores its importance", "reflects broader trends", "rich cultural heritage", "evolving landscape". Replace generic importance-claims with a specific, checkable fact. Specificity is the whole game.
3. **Kill trailing participle analysis.** No sentence-final "-ing" clauses that editorialize: "…, highlighting the significance of X", "…, ensuring Y".
4. **Avoid AI-vocabulary clusters**: delve, crucial, pivotal, tapestry, landscape (abstract), showcase, underscore, intricate, fostering, garner, meticulous, vibrant, robust, boasts, align with, testament. One may be fine; clusters are the tell. See the word list.
5. **Break the templates.** No "not just X, but Y" or "It's not X, it's Y" parallelisms; no rule-of-three triads everywhere; no "Despite these challenges…" conclusions; no "In summary / In conclusion / Overall" wrap-ups; no "It's important to note".
6. **Attribute precisely or not at all.** No "experts argue", "observers have noted", "industry reports suggest". Name the source or drop the claim. Never imply many sources when there is one.
7. **Never use a dash as punctuation.** No em dashes (—), and do not sneak the same construction back in with an en dash (–) or a spaced hyphen ( - ); that swaps the character while keeping the tell. Restructure instead: a comma, a colon, parentheses, or two sentences. Hyphens stay only inside compound words, and en dashes only in numeric ranges. (House rule; it is stricter than the Wikipedia page, which only flags overuse.)
8. **Format like a human.** Sentence case headings. No bullet lists where every item is a bold label plus a colon. Bold almost nothing. No emoji decoration, no needless small tables, no horizontal rules before headings, no skipped heading levels. Prose first; lists only when the content is genuinely enumerable.
9. **No chat artifacts.** No "I hope this helps", "Certainly!", "Would you like…", "Here is a…" framing; no knowledge-cutoff disclaimers; no speculation dressed as fact ("details are not widely documented, but likely…"); no unfilled placeholders like `[Your Name]` or `2025-XX-XX`.
10. **Use the target medium's markup**, never Markdown headed for a non-Markdown destination. Never invent citations, links, DOIs, ISBNs, or page numbers. Verify every reference you emit, and strip tool residue (`utm_source=`, `turn0search0`, `oaicite`, `[cite: 1]`).
11. **Vary rhythm, and repeat words when natural.** Reusing the same noun beats cycling synonyms. Mix sentence lengths. Commit to definite statements ("was the first") and use plain verbs (wrote, used, moved, tried, died).

### 4. Self-review pass

Before delivering, reread the output against the checklist above. Scan it against the term lists in `references/words-to-avoid.md` (they are written for reading, not for `grep -f`). Two checks are mechanical; run them on the draft file:

```bash
# Dash punctuation and machine artifacts: any hit outside quoted material is a bug.
# (Unspaced en dashes in numeric ranges like 2024–2025 are allowed and not flagged.)
grep -nE '—| – | - |turn0|oaicite|oai_citation|contentReference|attributableIndex|attached_file|grok[_-]|(start|end)_span|ppl-ai-file-upload|【|\[cite:|\[web:[0-9]|:::writing|utm_source=(chatgpt\.com|openai|copilot\.com)|referrer=grok\.com|↩|XX-XX|INSERT_|PASTE_' draft.md

# High-signal AI vocabulary: hits are prompts to reread the sentence, not automatic errors
grep -inE 'delve|deep dive|tapestry|testament|pivotal|crucial|underscor|showcas|foster(ing|s)|garner|meticulous|vibrant|intrica|boasts|bolster|interplay|stands as|serves as|not just|not only' draft.md
```

Fix a hit by rewriting the sentence, never by thesaurus-swapping the flagged word. The underlying pattern (vagueness, puffery, formula) is the problem, not the word itself.

### 5. Report

- **Draft/Rewrite**: deliver the text. If rewriting, summarize which signs you removed in one or two sentences.
- **Audit**: list the signs found with locations and quotes, state an overall read, and note the base-rate caveat: these are statistical signs, not proof.

## Fallback without network

Everything works offline from `references/signs-catalog.md` and `references/words-to-avoid.md`. Only the live-refresh step is skipped.

## Maintaining the snapshot

When asked to update this skill from Wikipedia (or when the snapshot looks stale), reconcile semantically; the catalog is a reorganized distillation, so a textual diff against the wikitext is noise.

1. Check whether the page changed since the pinned revision:

   ```bash
   curl -fsSL 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing&prop=revisions&rvprop=ids|timestamp&format=json'
   ```

   If `revid` equals the revision pinned under "Source of truth" above, nothing to do.

2. Otherwise fetch and read the full current wikitext:

   ```bash
   curl -fsSL 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing&action=raw' -o /tmp/signs.txt
   ```

3. Compare it section by section against `references/signs-catalog.md`. Fold in new signs, drop removed ones, and update `references/words-to-avoid.md` to match.

4. Update the pinned revision ID, timestamp, and sync date in both places: under "Source of truth" in this file and in the header of `references/signs-catalog.md`. The two pins must match.