Why does your writing sound like AI, even after you’ve edited it? A handful of specific words, sentence patterns, and punctuation habits, sometimes called “AI-isms,” are doing most of the damage. None of them are wrong on their own. Together, they’re the reason a piece of copy can be grammatically perfect and still feel like nobody actually wrote it.
I ran into this question the useful way: by accident, in my car, half listening to a marketing podcast between client meetings. The host kept saying “AI-isms” like everyone already knew what that meant. I didn’t. So I pulled into the shadiest parking lot I could find, because (as usual) it was 100-plus degrees and Texas summer turns shade into a competitive sport, and opened the “talk live” voice feature in the Gemini app to ask.
What came back was specific enough that I want to share it with you. If you use AI to help draft content for your business (or personal) writing these are the tells worth knowing, so your content stops sounding like AI wrote it and starts sounding like you.
The words that make writing sound like AI
Ask any AI to write with authority and it reaches for the same short list of words: delve, tapestry, testament, furthermore. None of these are incorrect. They’re just overused, to the point that trained readers (and, increasingly, untrained ones) clock them as synthetic on sight.
The paragraph structure is a tell too. AI-written content loves to close every section with a tidy summary sentence, the written equivalent of a bow on a box. One or two of those is fine. Five in a row and your reader starts skimming. This isn’t just a you problem either, outlets like Yahoo Tech and academic-writing tools like Paperpal have written their own guides on it recently.
AI punctuation tells
This is the part of the conversation I found super interesting and useful. #nerdalert Beyond word choice, AI leans hard on:
- M-dashes, to connect two clauses that could just as easily be two sentences
- Colons, to introduce lists and explanations, sometimes even when a list isn’t needed
- Semicolons, to chain multiple ideas into one long, winding sentence
I’ll admit the whole punctuation discussion makes me a little defensive. I’m a bedazzle lovin’ Texan girl who slept through high school English…I use exclamation points and ellipses like they’re going out of style!!! (And that’s just how I talk, y’all, not a sign an AI wrote it.)
The point isn’t that any single punctuation mark is a red flag. It’s the pattern of the same handful of marks showing up over and over until it starts to feel formulaic instead of human.
How to fix writing that sounds like AI
None of this requires a rewrite from scratch. It requires a pass aimed at exactly why your writing sounds like AI in the first place:
- Swap the buzzwords for plain language. If a sentence would sound strange coming out of your mouth in conversation, rewrite it until it wouldn’t.
- Vary your sentence length on purpose. Short sentence. Then a longer one that gives the reader room to breathe. That contrast is most of what makes writing feel human.
- Read it out loud. Your ear catches stiffness your eye will skim right past.
- Watch your punctuation patterns, not just your vocabulary. If every third sentence has a colon or a semicolon in it, that’s worth a second look.
Teaching your AI tool your actual voice
Here’s the part that matters most if you’re using AI to assist you with writing. You can, and should, teach your AI tool what your brand sounds like instead of editing every draft after the fact.
The method:
- Pull three to five pieces of your best past content, the ones that actually sound like you.
- Label each one, and add a line about why it’s a good example (the tone, the structure, the audience it’s for).
- Include a few different formats (a social post, an email, a blog paragraph), so the AI sees your voice adapt across contexts instead of learning one narrow pattern.
- Save all of it as a single reference document, with a section specifically on sentence rhythm: how long your sentences tend to run, where you get punchy, where you let a thought stretch out.
That document goes in front of the AI before it drafts anything of yours, which is exactly why the output stops sounding like AI in the first place. It’s the difference between technically correct copy and copy that actually sounds like the person whose name is on it.
The irony isn’t lost on me
I wrote this post about AI-isms with an AI’s help, then edited it looking for the exact tells I just described. That’s not a contradiction, it’s the whole point. AI is a genuinely useful drafting tool. It is not a substitute for a human pass before anything goes out under your name sounding like AI wrote it.
If you’re building content for your business and want a brand voice document that actually keeps your AI tools in line, that’s exactly the kind of groundwork worth doing once and reusing for years. Reach out if you’d like help putting one together.