Rewrite this for a busy human (without sounding fake)

You can spot an AI rewrite from across the room. The sentences are all the same length, everything comes in threes, and there’s a closing line about unlocking potential. It’s grammatically fine and completely hollow, and your reader clocks it in about two seconds.

The fix isn’t better software. It’s telling it what “good” sounds like, and then putting a bit of yourself back in.

Say who the reader is, not just what you want

“Make this more concise” gets you shorter mush. Naming the reader changes everything, because it forces decisions about what to cut.

Rewrite this for a project manager who has 30 seconds and three other fires. She needs to know what changed, what it costs her team, and what I need from her by Friday. Cut anything she can’t act on. Keep my wording where it works, British English, and don’t add anything I didn’t say.

“Keep my wording where it works” is the line that saves your voice. Without it you get a total rewrite, and total rewrites always come back smoother and blander than the thing you wrote.

Ban the tells by name

Vague instructions like “sound natural” don’t work, because the model’s idea of natural is the average of everything it has read. Be specific about what you don’t want.

Rules for this rewrite: no em dashes, no “delve”, “landscape”, “seamless” or “game-changer”, no opening line that restates the question, no three-item lists just for rhythm, and no inspirational closing sentence. Vary sentence length. Plain words over clever ones.

Keep that block in your notes and paste it under anything you want rewritten. It’s the single highest-value paragraph I’ve written this year, and it took ten seconds.

Give it a sample of you

If you want your voice, show it your voice. Paste two or three paragraphs you wrote on a good day, then say: match the rhythm and vocabulary of the sample, not the polish. You’ll get something that sounds like a slightly tidier version of you rather than a corporate newsletter.

Worth knowing: the sample does more work than any adjective you could use. “Warm but direct” means very little. Four hundred words of your own writing means quite a lot.

Put the human bit back in

Whatever comes out, change three things by hand. Add a detail only you would know. Cut the most impressive sentence, because it’s usually the emptiest. Then read the thing out loud and fix wherever your mouth stumbles.

That takes two minutes and it’s the difference between a message that sounds like you on a good day and one that sounds like a template with your name at the bottom.

When you shouldn’t rewrite at all

Short messages to people who know you. “Can you look at this before 3?” doesn’t need improving. A rewrite makes it longer and colder, and your colleague will wonder what’s wrong with you.

The rewrite trick earns its keep on the awkward middle-length stuff: the update nobody wants to read, the summary for a senior stakeholder, the explanation of a decision that went against someone.

What’s your own worst writing tic, the thing you always have to cut on a second pass?