How to keep your own voice when you write with AI

Readers can tell. Not always consciously — they may not be able to say why a piece feels like it came off a conveyor belt — but the tells are consistent enough that we have started keeping a list. The good news is that every tell is fixable, and most of the fixes belong in the brief rather than the edit.

This is the method our reviewers use. It is not clever. It is four steps, in order.

1. Give it a sample, not an adjective

“Write in a conversational, engaging tone” produces the same draft from everyone, because every tool has the same idea of what those words mean. A sample does not have that problem.

Paste in 300 to 500 words of your own writing — something you were pleased with, ideally in the same genre as what you are about to write — and say: match the sentence length, rhythm and level of formality of this sample. Be specific about what to copy. “Match the voice” is too vague; the tool will latch on to the most obvious feature (usually short sentences) and ignore the rest.

If you have never written the kind of thing you are asking for, find a sample by someone whose voice you would be happy to borrow and say so.

2. Brief the reader, not the topic

A draft written “about remote work” sounds like every other draft about remote work. A draft written for a first-time manager who has just been told her team is going hybrid has somewhere to go.

Put one sentence in the brief that describes a real person and what they need to know by the end. This changes what the tool includes, what it cuts, and — usefully — what examples it reaches for.

3. Draft, then strip

Take the draft and remove these before you do any other editing. All of them are things the tools do by default and none of them are things you would do:

• The summary sentence at the end of each paragraph. Tools like to close every paragraph by restating it. Cut the last sentence of each paragraph and see if anything is lost. Usually not.
• Balanced triplets. “It’s fast, reliable, and easy to use.” Three-item lists in every other sentence are a tell. Keep the strongest item.
• Hedges that sound like statistics. “Many experts believe”, “a growing number of”. If there is a number, use it. If there is not, say what you actually know.
• Rhetorical questions as transitions. “But what does this mean in practice?” Delete and start the next paragraph with the answer.
• The reflective close. The final paragraph that begins with “Ultimately” or “In the end” and says the piece was about balance, or nuance, or a journey. End on your strongest specific point instead.
• “It’s worth noting”, “it’s important to remember”, “notably”. These announce that a sentence is coming. Cut the announcement and keep the sentence.

This pass takes ten minutes and moves a draft most of the way from “generated” to “written”.

4. Put one thing in that only you would put in

After the strip, the draft is clean but anonymous. Add one thing per section that the tool could not have known: a detail from your own experience, a specific example from your industry, a disagreement with the conventional view. It does not need to be long. One concrete sentence per section is enough to change how the whole piece reads.

This is also the honest answer to “how much of this did you write?” — the argument and the evidence are yours, the tool typed the connective tissue.

A prompt that bakes in steps 1 and 2

Here is the brief template our reviewers use. It is deliberately short.

Write a [length] [format] for [one-sentence reader description].
By the end they should know [the one thing].

Match the sentence length, rhythm and formality of this sample:
"""
[300–500 words of your writing]
"""

Rules:
- No statistics or quotes that are not in the notes below.
- Do not end paragraphs with a summary sentence.
- No rhetorical questions.
- Do not write a conclusion; stop after the last point.

Notes:
[your material]

The “do not write a conclusion” line is the one people push back on. Try it. The endings you write yourself, in thirty seconds, are better than the ones the tool writes in ten.

What this does not fix

If you do not have a voice yet — if you are early in your writing and have not read enough of your own work to know what it sounds like — a sample will not help, because there is nothing to sample. In that case, write the first draft yourself and use the tool for the edit. It is slower and it is the right order.