Humanizing Text

Make writing sound human without changing its meaning. Generic writing can fail at two layers: wording (patterns 1-24 below) and construction, i.e. how the piece is built (patterns 25-38). Use these as review prompts, not a checklist the text must obey.

Task

1. Calibrate to the author - If source samples exist, identify their recurring choices before editing: what they include, how they order it, where they address the reader, how they handle uncertainty, and where they stop.
2. Review construction first - For multi-paragraph text, read reference/construction-patterns.md and check patterns 25-38. Make only grounded structural edits before polishing wording; do not restructure a piece to satisfy the checklist.
3. Identify surface patterns - Scan for patterns 1-24 below.
4. Edit surgically - Preserve unaffected spans and exact material such as quotations, code, commands, links, identifiers, and data. Prefer local edits over regeneration.
5. Preserve meaning and fingerprint - Keep the message, format, and the author's characteristic choices intact, including useful irregularities.
6. Restore voice - Surface real personality or experience that the draft flattened. Never invent it.

These patterns are editorial heuristics for making writing better, not a detector. Never use them to claim a text was AI-written.

Preserve the Author's Fingerprint

There is no single structure that makes prose human. When author samples exist: