Teach the AI to write like you, not like everyone

Stop writing with AI. At least the way most people do it.

Not because the tool is bad. Because everyone who writes with it has started writing the same piece. The same punchy opener, the same “it’s not just X, it’s Y” line, three bullet points, an em dash in the middle of every second sentence, and a closing paragraph that repeats what you just read. Readers learned the pattern in about a year. Now the pattern is the reason they scroll past.

I write with AI every day. Proposals, reports, articles like this one, my LinkedIn posts. Almost nobody notices, and that is the point. The difference is not a better prompt. “Write in a confident, casual tone” describes ten million people. The only thing that describes you is what you already wrote. So I gave the AI that, and I gave it a filter for the habits it cannot drop on its own.

This is the whole method, in the order it was built, with the prompts. It needs no code. It needs your old writing and about two hours.

Why the average sounds like the average

A language model predicts the most likely next word for the widest range of readers. Left alone, it writes the mean of the internet. That is useful for a summary and fatal for a voice, because a voice is exactly the set of choices that are not the mean.

You cannot prompt your way out of that. You can only give the model something more specific than the internet to predict from: you.

Step 1: collect everything you wrote before AI

Make one folder. Mine is called voice-samples. Put in it every piece of writing you produced by hand, before you started using AI:

Two rules. Only things you wrote yourself, and only from before you used AI, otherwise you are teaching the model to imitate itself. Aim for twenty pieces or more. The archive is the asset. Everything below is built from it.

Step 2: distil a voice file from the archive

Give the AI the whole folder and this prompt. It produces one page that describes how you write, with evidence. Read it, cut what is wrong, and keep it as a file the AI reads before every draft.

Read every file in this folder. They were all written by me, by hand.
Write a one-page "voice file" that describes how I write, with examples
quoted from the files. Cover:

1. The base: language, dialect, which English terms I keep untranslated.
2. Signatures: five to seven things I do in almost every piece. How I
   open, how I close, my rhythm, how I use lists, punctuation habits.
3. Skeleton: the structure of a typical piece, line by line.
4. Words and constructions I never use.
5. Ten reference lines quoted from my own writing that sound most like me.

Do not flatter me. Do not describe a tone I should have. Describe the
tone I have, with evidence.

Mine, for Egyptian Arabic, came out as a page. Shortened, it reads like this: spoken Egyptian with English terms left in Latin script, not formal Arabic and not translated English. A hook in line one that flips what the reader expects. Operator language, the P&L and the system, married to warmth. Reframes by contrast. Short sentences, one idea each. And ten lines quoted from my own posts that the AI can hold as a tuning fork.

The last section matters more than it looks. A description of a voice is a guess. Ten real lines are a standard.

Step 3: write the banned list

The voice file says what you do. This one says what the machine does and you do not. Mine is called Writing Baseline.md, it applies to every project I run, and it is deliberately short. Copy it as it is, then add your own.

Step 4: install the humanizer

This is the piece people ask about. It is a skill: a text file of editing instructions the AI loads whenever it finishes a draft. It is built on Wikipedia’s page called Signs of AI writing, maintained by the editors whose job is cleaning AI text out of Wikipedia. It lists thirty-three patterns, each with a before and an after.

On every draft it runs the same loop:

The thirty-three patterns fall into a handful of families. These are the ones that catch most drafts:

Where it lives depends on your tool. In Claude Code or Cowork, save it as ~/.claude/skills/humanizer/SKILL.md and it loads when needed. In ChatGPT, paste the same text into a Project’s instructions. With nothing fancy at all, keep it as a document and paste it in with each draft.

One more line made the real difference. I told the AI, as a standing rule in its memory: run the humanizer on every draft, without being asked, before I see it. A step you have to remember is a step you skip.

Step 5: the context that makes it you

Voice is half. The other half is knowing what you are talking about. My second brain holds a few plain text files the AI reads at the start of every session:

Five text files. No subscription and no new tool. The same files power proposals, the website and email, which is why the two hours are worth it: you set the layer up once and every output after it inherits the voice.

Step 6: measure, or the voice drifts back

Sounding like you is the floor. So I keep one more file: a short list of writing principles the AI reads before drafting, and each line carries a status. Seed means untested. Proven, weak, or killed mean the numbers have spoken. Every draft ends with a small block naming which principles it applied and which one it is testing. Every few days a scheduled task pulls the results and grades the list.

The list changes what the AI writes next, which is the difference between a style guide and a learning loop. A style guide is what you believed on the day you wrote it. The ledger is what actually held up.

Honest limits

This is not training a model. It is context. The AI forgets it the moment the files are not in the room, which is why the files live in one place it always reads.

It still drifts. Left alone for a few pieces it slides back towards the average. The humanizer catches most of it. Your edit catches the rest, and if you stop editing, the voice goes with it.

And it will never have a story you did not live. The archive gives it your rhythm. You still have to give it the thing that happened this week.

Do it yourself

If you already work inside an AI workspace, paste this and start:

I want the AI to write in my voice, not the average internet voice.
Work through these stages in order and wait for my review between each:

1. ARCHIVE. Ask me for a folder of writing I produced by hand, before I
   used AI: posts, emails, notes, in every language I write in. Read
   all of it before anything else.
2. VOICE FILE. From the archive, write a one-page voice file: the base
   (language, dialect, terms I keep in English), five to seven
   signatures with quoted examples, the skeleton of a typical piece,
   the words I never use, and ten reference lines quoted from me.
   Describe the voice I have, not one I should have.
3. BANNED LIST. Write a short writing baseline: the AI habits I never
   want (inflated transitions, rule of three, hedging filler, empty
   intensifiers, "not just X but Y", summary closers, em dashes as
   rhythm, promotional adjectives, Title Case) and the plain habits I
   want instead.
4. HUMANIZER. Install an editing pass based on Wikipedia's "Signs of AI
   writing" page: scan every draft for its patterns, rewrite without
   losing any point, ask "what still reads as AI?", rewrite again, and
   match my voice file. Zero em dashes in the final. Save it as a skill
   or as standing instructions, and run it on every draft before I see
   it, without being asked.
5. CONTEXT. Keep the voice file and the baseline next to my About Me,
   my project notes, and my brand file, and read all of them at the
   start of every session.
6. LEDGER. Keep a principles file with a status per line (seed, proven,
   weak, killed). End every draft with the principles it applied and
   the one it is testing. When results come in, update the statuses.

Rules: never publish anything on my behalf. Never invent a number or a
quote. Keep drafts short enough for me to sharpen in ten minutes.

The prompt is the compressed version of what took me a few weeks to settle. It will not remove the editing, and it should not. The editing is where the voice lives.

The deeper point stands without any AI. Write down how you write, what you never say, and what actually worked, and every draft after that starts from you instead of from the average. That is the same discipline The Brain installs inside a company, for the whole team, not one writer.