How to Make AI Text Sound Like You, Not a Robot
· 5 min read · GhostVerb team
An AI draft can be a great starting point. The problem is it sounds like every other AI draft: polished, upbeat, a little stiff, and nothing like the emails, essays or posts you actually write. Here's how to close that gap.
1. Start from your own writing, not a blank prompt
Give the model something you wrote, like your notes, a rough paragraph or an old email, and ask it to improve that rather than write from nothing. The more of your words it starts from, the more of your voice survives.
2. Fix the rhythm
People write unevenly. A long sentence that wanders a bit. Then a short one. AI text often runs at one steady length, which is part of why it feels flat. Read the draft out loud and break up or join sentences until it sounds like you talking.
3. Swap out the AI vocabulary
"Delve", "crucial", "leverage", "seamless", "tapestry": there's a short list of words chatbots love and people rarely use. Replace them with what you'd normally say. Here's our list of 40 AI giveaway words and plain swaps.
4. Keep your own habits
- Contractions: if you write "don't" and "it's", don't let the draft say "do not" and "it is".
- Spelling: British "colour" or American "color"? AI often defaults to American.
- Slang and strong words: if you'd say "proper good" or swear a bit, a draft that cleans that up won't sound like you.
- Your phrases: the sign-off you always use, the way you open an email.
5. Add an opinion and a detail
AI hedges. It balances every point and avoids specifics. Add one thing only you would know (a number, a name, what actually happened) and say what you think. That alone makes text feel human.
Or let a rewriter do steps 2–4 for you
GhostVerb's default style, "Your voice", was built for exactly this. It reads the text you give it and keeps its sentence rhythm, contractions, spelling and tone, and that includes slang and strong language, which other tools tend to clean up. It also filters out the usual AI words unless you used them, and removes any hidden watermark characters on the way.
It works on pasted text and on whole Word documents without breaking the formatting. You pay per use, with no subscription.