Why AI drafts rarely sound like you (and why that’s okay)

When you paste an AI-generated paragraph into a document, it often feels… off. It might be:

  • Too formal for your usual style.
  • Too generic and “safe”.
  • Full of phrases you’d never say out loud.

That doesn’t mean AI is useless. It just means the AI draft is a starting point, not a finished product. You still need to bring in:

  • Your actual opinions.
  • Your natural phrasing.
  • Your experiences and examples.

Think of AI as a rough sketch. Your job is to ink the lines, choose the colours, and sign your name in the corner.

Mindset shift: “AI wrote this for me” → “AI gave me a draft, and I’m going to shape it into something that truly sounds like me.”

Step 1 – Get clear on what “your voice” actually is

It’s hard to edit toward “your voice” if you don’t know what that means. Take two minutes and answer these questions:

  • Formality: On a scale from 1 (super casual) to 10 (very formal), where do you sit?
  • Directness: Are you straightforward, or do you soften your statements?
  • Energy: More calm and measured, or more enthusiastic and expressive?
  • Favourite phrases: Are there small expressions you use a lot in real life?
  • Audience: Are you talking to friends, classmates, teachers, clients, or the internet in general?

Write down 3–5 bullet points that describe your voice. For example:

  • Casual but respectful; uses “I” and “you”.
  • Prefers short sentences and concrete examples.
  • Occasionally uses humour but avoids sarcasm.

You’ll use this mini “voice guide” in the rest of the process.

Step 2 – Use AI to generate structure, not your final voice

The way you prompt AI has a big effect on how much editing you’ll need later. Instead of saying:

“Write a full article about X for me.”

Try breaking it into smaller steps:

  • “Give me an outline for an article about X aimed at [audience].”
  • “For this section, expand these bullet points into a paragraph: [your own notes].”
  • “Write a draft of this explanation in simple, student-friendly language.”

This way, the AI supports your thinking instead of replacing it. The draft will already be closer to your intent, which makes editing into your voice much easier.

Step 3 – Run the draft through OpenHumanizer for tone and flow

Before doing detailed manual edits, it can be helpful to clean up the “AI feel” of the draft. That’s where OpenHumanizer comes in.

Paste the draft into the tool and choose settings based on your voice guide:

  • Tone: Pick academic, casual, or professional based on your usual style.
  • Style: For many people, “balanced” or “blog” is a good starting point.
  • Strength: Use “medium” if the draft is already close to your style, or “heavy” if it feels very robotic.
  • Audience: Match this to your real readers (students, general public, professionals, etc.).

The goal isn’t to let the tool completely rewrite your voice—it’s to remove the stiff edges and repetitive patterns so your own edits can sit on top more naturally.

Try it now: Take a short AI paragraph you’ve generated recently, paste it into the OpenHumanizer tool, and compare the original vs. the humanized version. Notice how the sentence rhythm and wording change.

Step 4 – Do a “voice pass” focused only on sound

Next, read the humanized text out loud—or at least in your head as if you were speaking it. Mark any sentences where you think:

  • “I would never say it like that.”
  • “This sounds like a formal email, not like me.”
  • “This feels like marketing language, not my style.”

Then, rewrite just those parts in your natural voice. Some simple transformations:

  • Change “In addition, it is important to consider…” → “Also, it’s worth thinking about…”
  • Change “This clearly demonstrates that…” → “This basically shows that…”
  • Change “Furthermore, one must acknowledge…” → “On top of that, we should notice…”

You’re not just simplifying—you’re swapping in your own rhythm and phrasing.

Sentence-level tricks

  • Use contractions if you normally speak that way (can’t, don’t, it’s).
  • Split very long sentences into two or three shorter ones.
  • Replace vague abstract phrases with concrete, everyday language.

Step 5 – Inject your actual opinions and experiences

AI often stays neutral, balanced, and slightly generic. Your voice gets stronger when you:

  • Take a clear position (“I think…”, “In my experience…”).
  • Share small personal examples.
  • Explain why you care about the topic.

Look for places in the text where the AI has written something like:

  • “Many people find this challenging.”
  • “It is important to manage your time effectively.”
  • “There are several strategies that can be helpful.”

Replace or expand with your own angle, for example:

  • “I used to leave essays until the night before. Shockingly, that did not go well.”
  • “For me, the only way to manage my time was to stop pretending I could multitask.”
  • “Out of all the strategies I’ve tried, this one actually stuck.”

Even one or two specific personal lines per section can transform a generic AI draft into something that clearly belongs to you.

Step 6 – Keep what works, don’t rewrite everything

A common mistake is feeling like you have to completely rewrite the AI draft to “earn” it. That’s not necessary. If a sentence already:

  • Expresses your idea clearly, and
  • Sounds like something you could imagine yourself saying,

…then keep it. The point is not to delete all AI traces, but to make sure the final result is genuinely aligned with your thinking and style.

Editing can be light or heavy depending on how close the draft already is to your voice. Over time, as you get better with prompts and humanization settings, you might find you need fewer changes.

Step 7 – Run a clean-up pass with grammar and readability

After you’ve adjusted the voice, it’s a good time to clean up grammar, punctuation, and small readability issues. In OpenHumanizer, you can:

  • Paste the edited text into the grammar tool.
  • Choose a level like “standard” or “advanced”.
  • Select your language variant (US, UK, etc.).

Let it fix small errors and awkward spots, then skim the output. If any change makes the text feel less like you, tweak it back manually.

Shortcut: Humanize → Manual voice edits → Grammar check. This three-step chain often gets you from rough AI draft to “me, but polished” in a fraction of the usual time.

Step 8 – Use a quick “voice checklist” before you submit or publish

Right at the end, before you send your assignment, publish your blog post, or share your caption, run through this simple checklist:

  • ✔ Do at least a few sentences clearly sound like something I’d say to a real person?
  • ✔ Did I add at least one example, story, or opinion that comes from me?
  • ✔ Is the tone consistent throughout (not switching between extremely formal and extremely casual without reason)?
  • ✔ Would I be comfortable reading this out loud in front of my class, team, or audience?
  • ✔ Does it represent what I actually think, or did I just accept what the AI gave me?

Step 9 – Practise on small sections to build confidence

If editing a full AI-generated essay feels overwhelming, start smaller. Practise on:

  • One paragraph of a blog post.
  • One email or message.
  • One explanation or definition.

Take that small section through the full process:

  • Humanize in OpenHumanizer.
  • Edit into your voice.
  • Run grammar check.
  • Compare before vs after.

The more you do this, the more natural it becomes—and the more you’ll start writing in “your voice” from the beginning, even without AI.

How this fits with academic integrity and originality

If you’re a student, there’s an extra layer: you also have to follow your school or university’s rules about AI use. Editing AI content into your voice doesn’t automatically make it acceptable for every situation.

To stay on the safe side:

  • Check your institution’s guidelines on AI and writing.
  • Use AI to support your understanding, not to replace your thinking.
  • Make sure the ideas and structure genuinely reflect your own work.

Tools like OpenHumanizer are meant to help with clarity, tone, and readability—not to hide dishonest use of AI.

Putting it all together: a sample workflow

Here’s a full example of a “AI + you” workflow for an essay or blog post:

  • You brainstorm your main points and rough structure.
  • You ask AI to help expand your outline into a basic draft.
  • You run the draft through OpenHumanizer with a tone that suits your audience.
  • You edit the result: adjust phrasing, add your stories and opinions.
  • You run a grammar check in OpenHumanizer to polish the language.
  • You do one final read-through for voice, clarity, and integrity.

At the end of this process, the text is no longer “AI’s writing”. It’s your writing—helped by tools, but guided by your brain, your voice, and your decisions.

Your next experiment: Take a piece of AI-generated text you already have, even if it’s a bit messy. Move it through the full OpenHumanizer flow and the steps in this article. Save both versions—the raw AI draft and your final version—and compare them side by side. That difference is your voice coming through.