rishabh here, i run a small ai automation agency, so most of my writing is emails and proposals, not books. the tells still show up in my own drafts though. my two: a sentence that just restates the paragraph before it in a cleaner voice, and verbs like "leverage" or "unlock" that i would never say out loud on a client call. my fix is unglamorous, i read the draft out loud before sending. if i wouldn't say it on a call, it goes. what's the tell you catch most in your own stuff?

rishabh here, i run a small ai automation agency, so half my week is client-facing writing. for months i treated ai like a ghostwriter: clean prompt in, polished draft out. every draft came back smooth, confident, and completely faceless. what actually worked was the opposite. now i type my ugly first pass (wrong rhythm, half-finished thoughts, whatever i'd actually say on a call) and hand that over as raw material. its job is not to write. it's to cut, rearrange, and catch where i've padded. the tell almost disappears because the bones are mine. the slop only ever shows up when the ai is inventing the bones too. curious where this group lands: do you write first and use ai as an editor, or the other way around?

there's one line in every client reply i won't let AI write: the first sentence. everything after it can be drafted, tightened, restructured. but the opener is where the client decides whether i actually read their message or just processed it. i learned this after a client replied to my perfectly-formatted follow-up with 'did you even read what i sent?' i had. the AI just buried the answer under pleasantries. so now the AI drafts everything below the fold and i hand-write line one. takes 30 seconds, and it's the difference between 'his updates are so professional' and 'i trust this guy'. curious how others handle this: full rewrite in your voice, or one hand-written line on top of an AI draft?

every tool i've tried hands back a first draft that's technically fine and totally forgettable. the line i always delete is the summary sentence that tells me what i'm about to read. it reads confident and adds nothing. once it's gone the rest has to stand on its own, which is the whole point. what's the first thing you cut?

i run a small automation agency, so i write a lot of client updates and proposals, and i kept noticing the same thing: the drafts i'd get out of an AI model were clean, useful, and completely lifeless. every one of them had the same tells. "i hope this email finds you well" energy in a proposal. three bullet points where one honest sentence would do. a summary paragraph at the end that just repeated the first paragraph. what actually fixed it for me wasn't a better prompt. it was reading my own drafts out loud. if a sentence is something i would never say to a client across a table, it gets cut or rewritten. that single check killed most of the slop. the second thing that helped was deleting my own summary paragraphs on sight, they almost never added anything the body hadn't already said. curious what everyone here uses as their scrub step, is it a checklist, a detector, or just reading it out loud like me?