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Raw AI output has a distinct fingerprint: certain phrase patterns, an overuse of transitions, a tendency toward passive voice, and a hollow quality that careful readers immediately notice. Here’s how to edit it into something that reads like a human wrote it.
The AI Writing Tells: What to Hunt For
Train yourself to spot these patterns in AI output:
- Overused transitions: “It’s worth noting that,” “Furthermore,” “In conclusion,” “It is important to understand”
- Hollow affirmations: “Absolutely,” “Certainly,” “Of course”
- Nominalization: “The utilization of” instead of “using”; “make a decision” instead of “decide”
- Passive voice clusters: Sentences where the subject receives action rather than performs it
- Vague intensifiers: “Very,” “really,” “quite,” “somewhat”
- The word “delve” — AI loves this word. Real humans almost never use it.
The Editing Process
Pass 1: Fact-Check Everything
Before any style editing, verify every factual claim. Statistics, product prices, company names, study citations, and historical dates are all places where AI confidently fabricates. This pass cannot be skipped for client work.
Pass 2: Run Through Hemingway
Paste the draft into the Hemingway Editor (free web app). Address the red and yellow highlighted sentences — these are the ones dragging down readability. Aim for grade 8-10 reading level for most web content.
Pass 3: Hunt the AI Tells
Use Find & Replace to hunt the specific phrases listed above. “It’s worth noting” — delete the phrase, rewrite the sentence to start with the actual point. “Furthermore” — replace with a concrete transition or start a new paragraph. “Delve” — replace with “explore,” “examine,” or just cut it.
Pass 4: Add First-Person Voice
AI writes in the third-person generic. Real web content — especially in niches like writing tools, productivity, and career advice — reads better in a direct, first-person-adjacent voice. Add phrases like “In my experience,” “The setup that works for me,” “Most writers I know.” One or two of these per article transforms the register.
Pass 5: Add Specificity
AI generalizes. Humans specify. Replace “some writers use AI tools” with “writers I know who produce 10+ articles per month.” Replace “it can take time to learn” with “expect 2-3 hours to get comfortable with the interface.” Specificity signals real knowledge and is one of the strongest signals that separates human writing from AI output.
Tools That Help
ProWritingAid — run your edited draft through the Style Report to catch remaining passive voice and overused words. Hemingway — your first edit pass for readability. Grammarly — final pass for grammar and typos.
The goal is a draft that a reader wouldn’t identify as AI-generated — because it has specific details, a clear voice, verified facts, and the kind of natural sentence variation that AI still struggles to produce consistently.