Anti-Slop: Writing and Reviewing Human-Sounding Prose

"Slop" is phrasing that signals machine authorship and erodes a reader's trust: filler that announces itself, hedged puffery, formulaic rhythm, and clever-sounding constructions that carry no information. The goal is not to strip personality. It is to remove the patterns that make a reader think "a model wrote this" so the ideas land.

Prime directive: preserve voice

The most common failure of an anti-slop pass is over-correction into flat, voiceless text. That is its own tell. Before deleting anything, decide whether it is slop (adds no meaning, follows a formula) or voice (a deliberate choice the author would defend).

Cut filler, formula, and hedging.
Keep rhythm the author earns: a short punchy fragment after a long sentence, a deliberate tricolon, a load-bearing contrast, a strong closing line.
When unsure, leave it. A false positive that flattens a good sentence is worse than one surviving tell.

Make surgical edits. Do not restructure paragraphs, reorder arguments, or change meaning unless asked. Change phrasing, not substance.

Workflow

When reviewing (yours or someone else's)

Read the whole piece first. Note voice: is it punchy, formal, conversational? You are matching this, not overwriting it. 2. Scan for the tells in the catalog below. Collect candidates — do not edit yet. 3. Validate each candidate: does removing it lose meaning? Is it formula or voice? Discard false positives. 4. Apply the surviving edits one at a time, each a minimal phrasing change. 5. Re-read the edited passages for rhythm. Fix anything that now reads choppy or flat. 6. Report what changed and the tell category for each, so the author can judge.