The draft arrives in four seconds and then you spend forty minutes trying to make it sound like a person wrote it. That second part is the actual job now. If you want to edit AI writing into something you can publish under your own name, you need a fixed pass with named steps, not a vague sense that the draft „needs work.“ What follows is that pass, in order, with the specific things to cut and what to put in their place.
Work on a copy and keep the raw generation somewhere. You will occasionally delete the one sentence that was carrying a real fact, and you’ll want it back.
Delete the Tics Before You Touch Anything Else
Start with mechanical deletions. These cost no judgment and they remove most of the machine smell in a few minutes.
Run a find on each of these and decide, per hit, delete or replace:
- Throat-clearing openers: „In today’s fast-paced world,“ „In an era of,“ „As businesses increasingly.“
- The false contrast: „It’s not just X, it’s Y.“ Almost always, only Y matters. Keep Y, cut the rest.
- Vocabulary that shows up far more in generated text than in yours: delve, leverage, robust, seamless, unlock, elevate, landscape, tapestry, testament.
- Paragraph-opening connectors: Moreover, Furthermore, Additionally.
- Closing summaries that begin „In conclusion“ or „Ultimately.“
- Stacked triples: „clear, concise, and compelling.“ Pick the one you mean.
The connectors deserve a rule rather than a reflex. Delete the word and reread the paragraph. If it still follows from the one above it, the connector was decoration. If it doesn’t, your paragraph order is wrong and no transition word will hide that.
A worked example. Before: „Moreover, it’s worth noting that effective invoicing is not just about getting paid, it’s about building robust client relationships.“ After: „Invoicing is also how clients learn what you’re like to work with.“ Twenty-one words down to thirteen, and the second one says something.
Replace Hedged Claims With Specifics
Models hedge because they don’t know your business. You do. Every hedge is a place where a fact is missing.
Search for: many, often, can help, may improve, a variety of, significantly, some experts. Each hit gets exactly one of three treatments.
- Specify. Swap the vague claim for something from your own work: a real number from your books, a client situation you handled, a date, a tool name, a price you actually charge.
- Attribute. If the claim isn’t yours, name the source in the sentence and link to it. If you can’t find the source, you don’t have the claim.
- Cut. Delete the sentence. Most hedged sentences are filler and nothing collapses without them.
What you must not do is replace a vague claim with an invented number. „Many freelancers struggle with late payments“ is weak, but turning it into a precise-sounding percentage you made up is worse, and it’s the failure mode that gets people caught. If you don’t have the figure, rewrite the sentence so it doesn’t need one: „Late payment is the first thing freelancers bring up when I ask what’s broken“ is honest, specific to you, and requires no citation.
Watch for hedges in your own domain claims too. „This approach can improve cash flow“ promises a result. „This approach gives you a weekly view of what’s actually landing“ describes what the thing does. The second version is defensible.
Restore Sentence-Length Variation
Generated prose is flat in a measurable way. Take one paragraph and count the words in each sentence. If nearly every sentence lands between fifteen and twenty-five words, that uniformity is what readers register as robotic, even when they can’t name it.
Fix it by hand, two moves:
- Split. Find a sentence with a comma and a conjunction in the middle. Cut it into two. One of them will end up short. Good.
- Merge. Find two adjacent short sentences about the same thing and join them with a semicolon or a subordinate clause.
Aim for at least one sentence under eight words in every screen of text, and at least one over thirty. Then read the whole piece aloud. Where you run out of breath, split. Where you hear a drone, you’ve hit a run of same-length sentences.
Paragraph shape matters just as much. AI output tends toward uniform three- and four-sentence blocks. Break that. Let one paragraph be a single line.
There’s a structural version of the same tell: every heading followed by exactly three bullets, every list item the same length. Vary the counts. Turn one list back into prose.
Fact-Check Before Anything Goes Out
Do this last, on the edited version, because editing introduces new errors.
Go through and underline every checkable thing: numbers, names, dates, quotes, dollar amounts, regulatory or tax statements, capability claims about your own products, and every link. Each underlined item gets verified against a primary source you personally opened, softened to what you can actually support, or deleted. „It sounds right“ is not one of the options.
Two failure patterns show up constantly. First, plausible-looking citations: a report title, an institution, a year, all fabricated in a completely convincing format. Open the link. If it 404s, or the page title doesn’t match what the draft claims, cut the sentence. Second, claims about your own products from memory. Open the actual file and count the pages.
If the draft drifted into promising financial, legal, medical, or tax outcomes, rewrite those lines as descriptions of a process rather than predictions of a result. In a regulated field, have someone qualified review the piece before it publishes. Keeping a record of who checked what is the core of a human-in-the-loop content workflow, and it’s what turns „we edited it“ into something you can actually point to later.
A 25-Minute Pass to Edit AI Writing End to End
Put the steps on a timer so the pass stays a pass and doesn’t turn into a rewrite.
- Read aloud, no edits (2 min). Mark every spot that makes you wince. Don’t fix yet.
- Tic sweep (5 min). Run your find list. Mechanical deletions only.
- Hedge pass (6 min). Specify, attribute, or cut.
- Rhythm pass (5 min). Split and merge until the sentence lengths stop matching.
- Fact-check (5 min). Every underlined claim resolved.
- Rewrite the title and opening line from scratch (2 min). Yourself, without looking at the draft. These two get read more than everything else combined.
Keep the find list in a file and add to it. Your own tics will collect there alongside the model’s.
When the Edit Doesn’t Save It
Two situations mean you should stop editing.
If the piece still reads as generic after the full pass, the problem is upstream. The brief was too thin, so the model had nothing to work with but averages. Rewrite the brief with your own examples, constraints, and numbers in it, then generate again.
The other signal is volume. If you’re changing more than about half the sentences, you are writing, slowly, through someone else’s structure. Close the draft, take your outline, and write it directly. That’s usually faster.
If you’d rather run this as a documented routine than from memory, the Human-Sounding AI Content System packages the workflow into a 28-page guide, a 22-page prompt pack, and a 6-sheet planner for tracking what you publish. It sits alongside the other operational workbooks in the Cursiqa shop if a different part of your workflow is the one actually slowing you down.