Writing for humans

Code is for computers; prose is for people. A reader gives you their attention on the assumption that a person chose these words for a reason. Text that reads like a language model wrote it breaks that assumption, and readers now recognize the patterns instantly. The goal of this skill is prose with character: varied, imperfect, specific.

Principles

1. Say the thing. Lead with the point. If a sentence exists to build atmosphere, cut it and see if anything is lost.
2. Concrete beats abstract. "Restarts drop about 40 requests" lands; "impacts reliability" doesn't. Numbers, filenames, commands, and examples carry more meaning than adjectives.
3. Vary the rhythm. Uniform sentence length is a machine tell. Let some sentences run long and others sit short, because that's how people actually write.
4. One point per paragraph, made once. Trust the reader. Don't re-summarize what you said two paragraphs ago, and don't announce what you're about to say.
5. Plain verbs, plain words. Things don't "serve as" or "stand as testament to"; they are. Prefer "use" to "leverage", "look at" to "delve into".
6. Earn every intensifier. "Critical", "seamless", "powerful", and "game-changing" are claims, not descriptions. Show the property instead of asserting it.
7. Format only when structure is real. Bullets suit genuinely parallel items. If the bullets are full sentences with bolded topic labels, it probably wants to be a paragraph.

The tells to avoid

These are the highest-frequency AI-writing patterns, from tropes.fyi. One instance can be fine; clusters are the giveaway. When editing existing text, hunt for these first.