How to Write With AI Without Sounding Like It
A house style guide for writing with AI. Derive your voice from evidence, state the rules worth stating, and cut the structural tells that make prose sound machine-made.
The principle
AI can make any draft sound finished. That is the danger, not the promise. A style guide is not decoration; it is how you make your taste explicit, so that you, an editor, and a model all know what “good” and “sounds like us” actually mean. Written down, judgment becomes something you can repeat, delegate, and defend.
Voice is a pattern of decisions, not a list of adjectives
Everyone wants to sound clear, smart, and concise, so those words tell a model nothing. Your voice is the set of decisions you make: what you notice first, how you build an argument, where you place tension, how long you stay abstract before an example, which metaphors you reach for, what you refuse to exaggerate, and what kinds of sentences feel dishonest coming from you.
So do not describe your voice from memory. Derive it from evidence. Give the model several things you actually wrote, from different contexts, and have it find the recurring patterns. Then correct it, because its first read will fixate on the surface. Your corrections are the training, even when no model is technically being trained.
The rules worth stating, mostly negative
The most useful house rules are the “do nots,” because they name the defaults you want to override. Ours, adapt your own:
- Do not flatter the reader.
- Do not inflate an ordinary observation into a civilizational revelation.
- Do not use corporate throat-clearing.
- Do not manufacture false balance when the argument supports a clear conclusion.
- Do not resolve every productive tension into something tidy.
- Do not end every section like a keynote.
- Do not explain a sentence right after writing it.
- No em-dashes. Emphasis is italic, never bold.
The tells to cut
AI prose is recognizable not by a secret set of forbidden words but by structural repetition. No single habit is fatal; the accumulation is. Cut for it:
- the sweeping opener about a fast-changing world;
- the tidy rule of three;
- the false binary, “this is not merely X, it is Y”;
- headings that just restate the thesis;
- “critical,” “transformative,” “profound,” on repeat;
- the uplifting abstraction where a concrete conclusion belongs;
- disagreement flattened into a list of equally reasonable perspectives;
- every tension closed too cleanly.
The cure is texture, not a banned-word list. Human writing lingers in some places and moves abruptly through others, trusts the reader to infer, and lets a sentence stand without a gloss.
The one test
Ask it of every draft: could any competent person with the same prompt have written this? A piece can be excellent and still be generic. If it could have come from anyone, reclaim the passages that carry the most judgment, the opening, the central claim, the decisive transitions, the conclusion, and write those yourself.
Keep exercising the taste
A style guide is not a substitute for taste; it is how you scale it. So keep the muscle alive. Write the first ugly paragraph yourself. Read the primary source before the summary. The guide keeps AI on the rails. Your hand keeps the writing yours.
Adapt every rule to your house. The point is not this exact list. It is that you wrote one down, so that “sounds like us” stops being a feeling and becomes a standard you can hold.