Human writing mannerisms

Applies when a piece of copy has had its AI tells removed but still has no voice. Produces a version with one or two earned human moves added, so a real person is visibly in the room.

Stripping AI tells gets copy "to zero": nothing screams machine. It does not get you above zero. Clean copy with no texture still reads as AI, because "flawless and flat" is itself the tell. This skill is the positive, additive pass: a small library of moves that put a specific person back into the writing. It runs after the subtractive pass, never instead of it.

This is deliberately a separate skill from the anti-ai-slop-writing pass, not one combined step, because the two jobs do not always both apply. Every piece that ships should have its AI tells removed; not every piece should be made to sound casual. A formal announcement, a compliance note, or a technical one-pager needs to be clean, not chatty - it gets the tell-stripping pass and stops there. A LinkedIn post, a founder's thought leadership, or a personal email needs voice on top - it gets both, in order. Bundling the two would force human texture onto writing that should stay plain. Keeping them apart lets you run the floor everywhere and reach for these moves only where the register calls for it.

The play

1. Strip first, then add. Run the de-AI pass before this one. Order matters: adding texture to copy that still has rhetorical AI tells just makes the tells louder. If the tells are gone, continue.

2. Read the piece once and locate the flatness. Find the stretch where the writing is smooth, correct, and voiceless - usually the middle, where the argument goes on autopilot. That is where a move earns its place. Do not spray moves across every line.

3. Add one or two moves, no more. This counts distinct move-types from the library below - pick one or two, not all eight. A single move-type may recur two or three times within the piece and still count as one move (the conjunction opener, for instance). The one exception is the mid-sentence aside: use it at most once per piece. What reads as try-hard is stacking many different quirks, so hold the line at one or two move-types per piece. Match the move to the writer's real register - a dry operator gets a deadpan undercut, not a whimsical aside.

4. Pull the real detail, never invent it. The specificity move (below) uses only true detail the writer actually has. Specificity you own reads as lived; specificity you invent reads as fraud, and invented numbers or moments are a hard failure.

The move library, with why each one works and how to place it, lives in references/move-library.md. The rules for pairing this pass with tell-stripping - the order, the "to zero / above zero" model, and what not to do - are in references/pairing-and-order.md.

The moves (summary)

Each is expanded with multiple specimens in references/move-library.md.

• Mid-sentence aside. A short comment dropped into the middle of a line that steps outside the point to be dry or say the quiet part. "We ran it for six weeks (which, in ad-tech time, is roughly a geological era) and the numbers held."
• Undercut your own big statement. A confident claim, then a small deflation. "It's the best tool we've built. Low bar, given the last one."
• Oddly specific real detail. The weirdly exact true detail instead of the smooth generic one. "Fill rate dropped the Tuesday after the holiday, 11%, and nobody noticed until Thursday."
• Short. Then shorter. Vary sentence length hard; follow a long winding sentence with a two-word one.
• Start on And / But / So. A conjunction opener for a beat before the turn. If you pick this move, two or three uses is its ceiling.
• Talk to one person. Write to a single reader, not an audience. Contractions, "you", direct address.
• Self-interruption mid-thought. Start to say one thing, stop, say the truer thing. The visible seam is the humanness.
• Deadpan the absurd. State the ridiculous thing in a flat tone. Let the gap between calm delivery and wild content do the work.

What good looks like

• What the best editor notices first: the flatness is not a grammar problem or a word-choice problem - it is the absence of a point of view. The tell is that every clause is load-bearing and on-task. A human cannot resist the unnecessary side comment; the unnecessary bit is the human bit. The fix is to add one, not to rewrite the sentence.
• The common mistake: treating this as a checklist and applying every move at once. Copy with an aside and an undercut and a fragment and a conjunction opener in four consecutive lines reads as an AI performing "casual", which is worse than flat. The mediocre version also reaches for a generic quirk ("Let's be real,") instead of a move that fits the specific writer.
• How you know it worked: read it aloud. If one moment makes you hear a specific person - their dryness, their impatience, their eye for the weird true detail - it worked. If it is smooth all the way through with nothing that could only have come from this writer, it is still at zero. If it now reads as someone trying hard to sound casual, you added too much; cut back to one move.

Rules

• MUST run the tell-stripping pass before this one. This is the second pass, never the only pass.
• MUST use only real, true detail for the specificity move. Invented numbers, dates, or moments are a hard failure.
• MUST keep it to one or two moves per piece.
• MUST match the move to the writer's real register, not a generic "fun" voice.
• NEVER stack multiple moves in consecutive lines.
• NEVER use a move to prop up a claim that is not actually true or not actually the writer's.