Sound Human Again: Remove the “AI Smell” From Your Writing

Discover what the research shows: when colleagues and clients detect AI in your writing, they quietly rate you as less sincere, less caring, and less trustworthy — and they never tell you. You’ll understand exactly what’s at stake before you fix it.

One dash proves nothing; six patterns in one email prove everything. Learn why AI smell is a cluster of compounding signals — and why banning a few words won’t fix your writing.

A jargon-free explanation of why language models default to bland, hedged, over-structured prose. Once you know the cause, every fix in this course will make sense instead of feeling like a list of arbitrary rules.

AI detection tools flag innocent writers and miss obvious AI text. Learn why chasing a “0% AI score” is the wrong goal, and why the only detector that matters is the human reading your message.

Master the two tiers of AI vocabulary: the notorious giveaways (delve, pivotal, testament) and the sneakier corporate filler (robust, holistic, transformative). You’ll build your personal banned-words list.

AI uses dashes at several times the human rate, bolds phrases mid-sentence, and decorates bullets with emojis. Learn to spot and strip the formatting habits that scream “generated.”

Learn why AI packages everything in threes and leans on negative parallelisms — and how to rewrite both patterns so your sentences stop sounding like a keynote script

Human writing has a heartbeat: long sentences, then short ones. Fragments, even. You’ll learn to hear uniform rhythm — the hardest tell to name and the easiest to feel.

Spot the template: a signpost intro, a tidy body, a restated conclusion, relentless positivity, and hedges on claims nobody would dispute. Learn why this structure feels hollow and what confident writing does instead.

Put your new knowledge to the test on real writing samples. You’ll score passages for AI smell using a simple checklist — the same one you’ll use on your own drafts for the rest of the course

Stop editing at random. Get the full overview of the Cut → Break → Add system that turns any AI draft human in 10–15 minutes, and see why the order of the passes matters

Rework the structural tells you catalogued in Module 2: vary sentence length, break up the rule-of-three lists, and rewrite the “it’s not X, it’s Y” constructions into plain statements.

AI writes in generalities; you own the specifics. Learn to inject real numbers, named examples, first-hand observations, and an actual opinion — the ingredients no model can supply.

Learn the quick quality gates to run before you hit send: read it aloud, check the first sentence, scan for your banned words, and ask “would I say this to their face?”

A complete demonstration: one genuinely AI-smelling business email edited through all three passes on screen, with every decision explained. You’ll follow along with your own draft.

Create the course’s most valuable asset: a one-page profile of your real writing voice — sentence habits, favourite phrases, words you’d never use — extracted from emails you’ve already sent.

Learn the prompt formula that reliably produces human-sounding first drafts: paste your writing samples, attach your banned-words list, and describe your reader as a person, not a demographic

The first draft is a starting point, not a verdict. Learn the short feedback loop — critique, redirect, tighten — that gets you to a usable draft faster than accepting and rewriting ever will.

Package everything into ready-to-use prompts for your recurring documents: status updates, client emails, proposals, and posts. Write the setup once; sound like yourself every time after

Research shows AI-smelling email damages trust more than any other format — especially from managers. Learn the email-specific fixes, and the message types where AI perception hits hardest.

LinkedIn is ground zero for AI smell, and audiences are ruthless about it. Learn to write posts with a real point of view that survive the feed’s most sceptical readers.

Long documents multiply AI tells across dozens of pages. Learn where robotic prose does the most damage (executive summaries, recommendations) and where structure is actually fine.

When every competitor uses the same models, everyone’s copy converges. Learn to use voice, specificity, and opinion as differentiators your competitors’ AI can’t replicate.

Some messages — difficult feedback, apologies, condolences, big asks — lose all meaning the moment they feel generated. Learn to recognise the human-only zone and what to do when writing these is hard.

Bring the system to your team: build a shared voice guide AI can follow, and learn to give feedback on a colleague’s AI-smelling draft without making it awkward.

A day-by-day plan to make the three-pass edit automatic: which habits to build each week, how long each takes, and how to know when editing for AI smell has become instinct

Navigate the questions most courses dodge: when you should tell people AI helped, what your company policy likely requires, and where assistance ends and misrepresentation begins.

Todays tells are not forever; models improve and patterns shift. Learn a simple routine for updating your banned-words list and pattern checklist so your radar never goes stale

Bring it all together: take three real pieces of your own writing through the full system — prompt, draft, three-pass edit, quality checks — and assemble your personal playbook for every future document.