You can usually spot machine-written text in the first two sentences. It's not one thing — it's an accumulation of small tells: the same sentence rhythm repeated over and over, transition words nobody uses out loud, and a strange allergy to taking a position.
The good news is that every one of those tells is fixable. Here are the seven we see most, and what to do about each.
1. Kill the stock transitions
"Furthermore", "moreover", "it's important to note that" — real people almost never write these. Read your draft aloud; anywhere you stumble, a machine probably wrote it. Swap them for the connectives you'd actually say: "and", "but", "so", or nothing at all.
2. Vary your sentence length
AI text tends to produce sentences of eerily similar length, which creates a flat, metronomic rhythm. Human writing breathes. Short punch. Then a longer sentence that stretches out an idea, gives it room, and lands somewhere specific. Mix them deliberately.
3. Cut the hedging
"This may potentially help some users in certain situations" says nothing. Machines hedge because they're trained to avoid being wrong. You're allowed to have an opinion: "this works" or "skip this". Commitment reads as human.
4. Delete every third adjective
Machine text loves stacked modifiers: "a powerful, seamless, intuitive experience". Pick the one adjective that earns its place and cut the rest. If none earns it, cut all three.
5. Use concrete details
"Improve your workflow" is machine-speak. "Stop retyping the same apology email every Monday" is human. Specificity is the single strongest humanity signal there is — machines generalize, people remember actual Mondays.
6. Break a grammar rule on purpose
Starting a sentence with "And" or "But". A fragment, for emphasis. Ending on a preposition because that's what the sentence wants to end on. Perfect grammar everywhere is itself a tell.
7. Score it before you send it
The fastest fix is knowing there's a problem. That's why every rewrite on rephrase.io ships with a Human score — a 0–100 read on how natural the text sounds, next to tone match and clarity. If your draft scores 60, you'll know before your reader does.