Content authenticity review

Purpose

A draft can be accurate and still read as if a machine wrote it, and readers notice. The tells damage trust in the author. This skill removes them in two passes, then rewrites the copy in plain, connected prose, without adding any fact the author did not supply.

When to use

• A post, email, page, case study, article, or executive draft reads as generic or machine-written.
• A team is reviewing content produced in bulk, and the output sounds the same.
• An executive's thought-leadership draft needs to sound like the executive.

Route elsewhere when:

• The question is the subject line of an email. Use email-subject-and-copy-review.
• The question is the customer language to use. Use ad-copy-voice-of-customer.

Inputs

• The draft, and where it will appear.
• The reader.
• The author's name and role, for the voice.
• Any house style or voice guide.
• The facts the author can supply: claims, figures, and quotes that are approved.

Two kinds of tell

Scan for each kind separately:

1. Rhetorical moves. Patterns that serve the writer and never the reader. Examples in kind: a setup sentence that promises a point, a stacked list of three adjectives, a closing line that restates the opening. These are wrong every time they appear, so remove them.
2. Ordinary structures in clusters. Common words and forms that read fine once but signal a machine when they repeat across a piece. Examples in kind: a run of sentences of the same length, identical paragraph shapes, and a habit of hedging every claim. Remove them where they cluster, not where they appear once.

Procedure

Run pass one, then pass two, in order. Pass one removes the tells. Pass two rewrites what is left.

Pass one: subtract

Remove every rhetorical move. Then check for clusters of ordinary structures, and vary them. Do not change meaning or facts in this pass.

Pass two: rewrite

1. Lead with the claim. The first sentence says what the piece is about.
2. Attach evidence to each claim. Use only the facts the author supplied. If a claim has no evidence, mark it.
3. Make a person the actor. "Our team cut the review time" is better than "Efficiency was improved".
4. Write in connected prose. Each paragraph follows from the one before, rather than being a list of slogans.
5. Keep the author's voice from the supplied samples, and the house style if there is one.
6. Put the point first and take a position. Where the author supplied a stance, state it plainly. Do not hedge a claim the author has already made.
7. Prefer a number or a named detail to an adjective, where the author supplied one. Cut any word whose removal changes nothing.
8. Read it aloud. If a knowledgeable person in the field would not say the sentence, rewrite it.

Output

• The rewrite, in full.
• A list of changes, grouped by the two kinds of tell.
• A list of claims that still need a source from the author.

Quality bar

No fact, figure, or quote is added. Every claim is either evidenced or listed as needing a source. A person is the actor where the sentence describes an action. Clusters are broken without losing meaning. Watch for a rewrite that adds a statistic, a quote invented to sound human, and a piece where every paragraph has the same shape after the rewrite.