Editing Machine Output Into Your Own Voice

The wrong editing pass

Machine output arrives grammatically correct, well organised, and readable.

So the ordinary editing instinct, which is to fix errors, finds nothing to do.

The pass that is needed is different: removing what is there rather than correcting it, and adding what a person would have included.

Which is why the usual edit takes ten minutes and changes nothing about how the page reads.

What to cut first

• The opening paragraph, usually entirely.
• In today's world and its relatives.
• Whether you are X or Y constructions.
• Restating the heading as the first sentence.
• The closing summary of what was said.
• Any sentence that could open any page.

The first is the highest-return single change. Machine-drafted pages almost always begin with a paragraph explaining that the subject is important, and deleting it takes the reader straight to the content.

Replace hedges with figures

Which is the change that most makes a page sound like somebody who knows the work.

Many, several, typically, and can vary are what a writer uses when they do not have the number.

You have the number, so put it in: most jobs take two to three days, we cover within forty minutes of the shop, prices start around eleven hundred dollars.

Every hedge replaced with a figure does two things at once, sounding human and being more useful.

Go through the draft looking specifically for vague quantity words, which is a mechanical search rather than a judgement.

Those words are the fingerprint of writing done by somebody without access to the facts.

Shorten and vary the sentences

Since rhythm is most of what makes prose sound like a person.

Machine output tends toward sentences of similar length, each carrying a similar weight, which reads as level and slightly relentless.

Break the longest ones. Leave some very short. Let one run longer where the thought genuinely does.

Reading a paragraph aloud finds this immediately, and it is the only reliable test.

Anything you would not say out loud in that shape gets rewritten until you would.

That single habit does more than any list of words to avoid.

A worked example

A business had a drafted service page they described as fine but flat.

The edit removed the first paragraph and the last, cut four sentences that restated headings, and replaced eleven vague quantities with actual figures from their records.

Two sentences were split and one paragraph was cut in half.

They added three things a person would have said: that the work is noisy, that they cannot do it in the rain, and what they charge to come out and look.

The page lost about a fifth of its words and read like the owner.

The whole edit took twenty-five minutes.

Put back what a person would have said

Which is the additive half and the more important one.

The tool omits anything qualifying, awkward, or particular: the caveat, the exception, the thing that annoys you about the trade.

Those are what a customer remembers and what makes a page sound like it came from somewhere.

Ask what you would tell somebody standing in front of you that is not on the page, and add three of those.

They are frequently the most useful sentences on the finished page.

And they are the part no tool can generate, which is the argument for doing it at all.

Use your own words for your own things

A small point that gives away a draft more than anything else.

The tool will use the general term where you use a specific one: your services, your equipment, your process, your area.

Go through and replace each with what you actually call it, including the slightly unusual local term.

Customers searching use those words too, so this helps twice.

And a page using the trade's real vocabulary reads as written by somebody in the trade, which is the whole objective.

Read it against something you wrote

The check that tells you whether the edit worked.

Find an email you sent a customer explaining something, and read it beside the edited page.

If they sound like different people, the edit is not finished.

That email is your actual voice, written without thinking about voice, which is why it is the right benchmark.

Some businesses find it faster to start from such an email and expand it than to edit a draft into shape, which is worth trying once.

If that turns out to be true for you, it is worth knowing, since it changes what these tools are for in your work rather than how you use them.

Do not ask it to add the voice

Since this is the obvious shortcut and it produces something worse than the neutral version.

Asking for a friendly tone, a conversational style, or the voice of a local tradesman produces a performance of those things: exclamation marks, rhetorical questions, and a forced informality nobody actually writes in.

That reads as insincere in a way the plain version does not, and insincerity costs more than blandness.

Voice comes from what you know and what you are willing to say, neither of which is a style setting.

Leave the output plain, then do the editing above, which is slower and is the only version that works.

The counter-case

Voice is not always the priority.

A specifications page, a policy, or a technical reference is better plain and neutral, and personality there is an obstacle.

Some businesses also have no distinctive voice and inventing one produces something worse than the competent version.

And a page nobody reads does not justify twenty-five minutes.

Cut the first and last paragraphs, replace the hedges with figures, read it aloud, and add three things you would have said.

The edit

1. Delete the opening paragraph.
2. Delete the closing summary.
3. Find every vague quantity and replace it.
4. Read it aloud and fix the rhythm.
5. Swap general terms for your own.
6. Add three things you would have said.
7. Compare it against an email you wrote.

Step three does the most, since vague quantity words are the fingerprint of writing produced without access to the facts, and you have the facts.

The wider question of authorship is covered in getting somebody else to write it.

Frequently asked questions

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