humanize

Editing a good draft makes it worse. Rubric-guided model editing lifted below-median drafts on every measured dimension and pushed above-median drafts down: coherence −13.92, framing −12.06, both p<.001, across 45 abstract pairs and 869 keystroke-level edit logs. The first decision is never which tells to fix. It is whether this text should be rewritten at all.

Fix the writing, not the detection. Generated prose is worth fixing because it is vague, padded, and evasive. Detectors fire on post-training artifacts rather than on machine authorship, and they flag second-language and formulaic human writing at the same time. An edit whose purpose is a detector score is out of scope; every edit must improve the text for a reader.

Two failures carry equal weight. Under-editing leaves the tells and the text reads as generated. Over-editing flattens voice, deletes specifics, and produces a different slop — and it is the one the measurements above say is easy to cause.

Decide before editing

Read the whole text first. Nothing below is decidable from a search, because every one of these tells has a legitimate twin a few lines away.