Write it with AI. Have it still sound like you.

Something lands in your inbox and three sentences in, you know nobody wrote it.

It’s polite. It’s clear. There’s an exclamation mark that didn’t need to be there, and somewhere in the middle, the word “dive.” Nothing in it is wrong, exactly. It just doesn’t sound like anybody.

You have probably been on the other end of it too. Asked for help with an email, got back something perfectly reasonable, and sent it anyway with a small uneasy feeling that it wasn’t quite how you talk.

This page is the fix, and it takes one sitting.

It isn’t the prompt

There are people selling prompts that promise to fix this, and they don’t work, because the problem was never how you asked. It was what you handed over.

You gave it nothing of your own and asked for something personal back. There was nothing of yours in the room. So it did the only thing it could do - it wrote the average of everything it has ever read. Competent, and belonging to nobody.

Everything below comes out of one idea: your words go in first. You are not learning how to have better words invented for you. You are learning how to keep your own through a tidy-up.

Step one - stop typing and talk

You are not bad at explaining things. You do it all day, out loud, without thinking about it. What you are bad at - what everybody is bad at - is doing it while a blank screen sits there waiting for you.

So skip the screen.

Every one of these tools has a microphone somewhere in the box where you type. I’m not going to tell you exactly where, because it moves, and it sits in a different spot on a phone than it does on a computer. Look for it. It’s there.

Then say the thing out loud, the way you’d explain it to somebody sitting across the table from you. What you do, and why you do it that way. What went wrong the first time you tried it.

Two minutes of that gives you more to work with than an hour of staring.

And don’t tidy as you go. Stumbles, false starts, sentences you abandon halfway through and start again. Leave all of it in. The mess is the part that’s yours, and it’s the only thing in this whole process that couldn’t have come from somewhere else.

Step two - ask it to tidy, not to improve

Here’s the word that ruins it: improve.

Ask for your writing to be improved and you’ll get it improved. Smoother, more balanced, more formal, and less like you. It’ll take “I got that wrong for about a year” and hand you back “this proved to be a valuable learning experience.” Both are perfectly good sentences. Only one of them is yours.

Tidying is taking out what you didn’t mean to say. Rewriting is putting in what you never said. You want the first, and you have to ask for it in so many words, because the second is what it reaches for on its own.

Don’t send your talking on its own. It will answer you - comment on what you said, offer to help, start drafting something - and now its phrasing is sitting in the conversation and you’re editing its words instead of yours.

So when you’ve finished talking, don’t press send. Paste this underneath what you said, and send the whole thing as one message.

Tidy this up. Take out the stumbles and the repetition.

Keep my words, my phrasing and my sentence lengths. Don't make it more formal and don't make it flow better.

If a sentence is clumsy but it's clearly how I'd say it, leave it clumsy.

That last line does more than it looks like. A bit of clumsiness is one of the strongest signs that a person wrote something. Sand it all off and you’re left with something smooth that nobody quite trusts.

What comes back will surprise you by how little changed.

I did this with four hundred words of talking about my dog. It broke the wall of text into paragraphs, dropped the bit at the end where I was wondering out loud whether the recording was still running, and left every other word exactly as I said it - including “the other things that he attacks the TV for is,” which isn’t a sentence, and which is how I talk.

That’s the whole job. Not better than what you’d have got by asking it cold. Yours, and readable.

It did make one judgment call, deciding the business about the recording wasn’t part of the story. It was right. Read what comes back anyway and check that nothing you wanted went with it.

Step three - the tells

Some of these you won’t be able to unsee once somebody points them out. That’s the idea. Noticing them in your own drafts is most of the skill.

Exclamation marks. It reaches for them constantly, and almost nothing you write needs one.

Dive in, delve, unlock, elevate, supercharge, streamline. These are its favorite words and almost nobody else’s. “Let’s dive into the details.” “This unlocks a whole new level.” You’d have said “let’s look at the details” and stopped there.

“It’s not just a X - it’s a Y.” It names something ordinary, then swaps it for something grand. “This isn’t just a checklist - it’s a whole new way of working.” “It’s not just coffee, it’s a morning ritual.” You can’t search for that one, because what repeats is the pattern and not the words.

Everything arriving in threes. Three examples, three adjectives, three items in every list. It’s a very even way to write, and people aren’t even - real writing runs long and then stops short.

Opening by explaining that the subject is important. “In today’s fast-paced world.”

Closing by summarizing what it just said, starting with “Ultimately” or “At the end of the day.”

Questions used as headings. “So what does this mean for you?”

Two things about that list. It isn’t complete, and it won’t stay current - the tells move as the tools change, and a phrase that gives the game away this year will sound ordinary in two. If something starts turning up in everything you read, add it yourself.

Here’s the version you can paste. It goes above anything you ask for, and it stays there.

Never use exclamation marks.

Never use these words: dive in, delve, unlock, elevate, supercharge, streamline, journey, landscape, realm.

Never use the construction "not just X, it's Y."

Don't put things in threes out of habit. Two is fine. Four is fine.

Don't open by telling me the subject is important, and don't close by summarizing what you just said.

Don't use questions as headings.

Plain words. Short sentences. If a sentence sounds like an advertisement, cut it.

Both of those prompts are on a single page you can print and leave next to the keyboard. There’s nothing on it about where the buttons are or what anything is called, so it will still be right long after this page needs updating.

Watch what “improve” takes

I talked for two minutes about my dog attacking the television. Then I asked for it two ways - once tidied, once improved. I told the improve one to make sure it still sounded like me talking to a friend.

Read them both. They look almost the same.

Three things went missing, and none of them look like damage until you see them next to each other.

I asked it to sound like me talking to a friend and it did all three anyway. Not because it ignored me. Because I asked for improvement, and improvement means making things regular - and every odd thing about the way you talk is, by that measure, a defect.

The tidied one has three commas in it that I didn’t put there. That’s all it changed.

The test

One question, and it’s the only one that matters:

Could somebody who knows you tell that you wrote this?

Not “is it good.” Not “is it clear.” Those are easier questions and they’ll both give you the wrong answer, because this stuff is usually good and nearly always clear. That’s exactly what makes it hard to catch.

Read it out loud. It’s the fastest way there is. You’ll hear a sentence you’d never say a good while before you can explain what’s wrong with it.

If it fails, it isn’t the prompt

You don’t need a better set of words to paste in. Go back to the first step and give it more of your own material. Talk for longer, or talk about the part you skipped because you assumed everybody already knew it.

Nearly every failure here is the same failure. Not enough of you went in.

Before you close the tab

Keep the transcript.

Whatever you said out loud in step one, paste it into a document and save it somewhere you’ll find it again. Not because you’ll reread it - you probably won’t. Because the next thing you write can be built on the same material, and starting from your own words a second time is a good deal quicker than starting from nothing.