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What Makes AI Writing Sound Like AI Writing (And How To Fix It)

By Nigel Guy · 2 min read

"It sounds like AI" is a real, specific complaint, not a vague vibe — and because it's specific, it's fixable. Most people respond to it by asking for "more human" writing, which is a description, not an instruction, and predictably doesn't work.

The habits, named

1. Throat-clearing openers. "In today's fast-paced world," "Let's dive in," restating the title as the first sentence. Cut the first paragraph entirely and see if the piece loses anything — usually it doesn't.
2. The "not X, but Y" sentence, overused. A rhetorical device that reads as clever once and formulaic the fifth time in one piece.
3. Everything gets a rule of three. Real writing doesn't always come in threes. Vary the count on purpose.
4. Hedged confidence on things that don't need hedging. "It's important to note that," "arguably," stacked onto ordinary factual sentences that would read fine stated plainly.
5. A tidy, uplifting close on every single piece, regardless of whether the actual content earned one. Not every guide needs a bow on top.

The mechanism for fixing it

1. Read the draft out loud. The habits above are more obvious to the ear than the eye.
2. Cut the first paragraph and the last one, provisionally. See if the piece is actually worse without them. Often the real content starts one paragraph in and ends one paragraph early.
3. Search for "not only," "it's worth noting," and "in conclusion" and cut or rewrite every instance you find.
4. Vary sentence length on purpose — a string of same-length, same-rhythm sentences is one of the more reliable tells.
5. Feed it real samples of your own writing and ask it to match the rhythm specifically, not just the "tone" — see "Claude's Tone Settings" for the full version of this.

What to skip

Skip trying to fix this with a single magic instruction like "write more casually" — it treats a specific, fixable pattern as a vague mood problem. And skip obsessing over every sentence on a low-stakes draft; save the full edit pass for anything that's actually going out under your name.

Guardrails

• Fixing the surface habits doesn't fix bad reasoning or a weak argument underneath — edit for substance first, then for these tells.
• Some of these habits (the rule of three, a clean closing line) are also just... reasonable writing sometimes. The goal is noticing overuse, not banning them outright.
• If you're publishing AI-assisted writing under your own name, the edit pass is not optional — a draft that still reads as generic is a draft that hasn't actually been edited yet, whatever tool produced it.

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