12 Words that out you

Delete these before you publish

July 26, 2026

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A friend sent me a post last month and asked if I thought it was real. The grammar was clean. The structure made sense. Nothing was wrong with it. And both of us knew a machine had written it inside of about four seconds.

That bugged me, because I could not say why. It was a vibe, not a reason.

Then I hit a breakdown from someone who works with these tools professionally, and they had actually done the work of naming it. They listed 12 dead giveaways to cut from your writing, then paired them with 11 Claude skills that clean up the mess. It was the most practical thing I have read on this all year, so I pulled it apart for you.

The idea underneath it is blunt. If your writing sounds like a chatbot, people quit trusting it. Fix the tells and you sound like a person again.

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The red list: 12 things to delete today

Their point is that these words almost never come out of a real human mouth. Once you see them, you cannot unsee them.

"Delve." You have never said this out loud. Not once. It screams machine.

"Crucial" or "pivotal." Almost nothing is that pivotal. The word inflates everything around it.

"Tapestry." Nobody talks like this in a business post.

"Here's the thing." There is no thing. It is filler wearing a transition costume.

"Hope this helps." It does not, and worse, it outs you instantly.

"After careful consideration." Usually written with none whatsoever.

"To provide a quick update." Just give the update. Skip the runway.

"Most people..." A lazy oversimplification that dodges the actual point.

"Robust," "seamless," "realm." The corporate AI starter pack.

Adverb abuse. Lines like "X quietly runs Y." Nothing is quietly running anything. It is decoration.

"It's not X, it's Y." The most famous AI sentence structure alive.

"This isn't a budget, it's a statement of intent." That fake deep flip fools nobody.

Here is the part I did not expect. They say the patterns give you away faster than the individual words do. One robotic rhythm and your reader checks out before the sentence even lands.

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The 11 skills doing the cleanup

This is where it got genuinely useful for me. They shared the exact set of 11 skills they run to scrub AI smell out of a draft, and each one does a single job.

Writer. Drafts in your structure, not Claude's. A good draft going in means less to clean up later.

Editor. Cuts fluff. Every sentence earns its spot or it gets deleted.

Fact-checker. Kills invented stats and quotes that sound too good. One hallucinated number and you are done.

Anti-AI style. The base rewrite. It breaks the rhythm where every sentence lands at the same 18 words.

Ban the AI words. Auto-blocks delve, crucial, tapestry, and the rest of the red list above.

Ban the AI patterns. Kills "it's not X, it's Y" and the fake deep endings that expose you.

Sound like your posts. Feed it five of your old posts and it writes like you instead of like Claude. They say this one replaces every paid humanizer tool.

Humanizer. Strips whatever machine smell is left. Contractions in, em dashes out.

Red-pen. Flags your weak lines before a reader ever finds them.

Self-critique. Claude critiquing Claude beats Claude on the first pass. It loops until the text reads clean.

Auto-block banned words. The safety net. Nothing on the red list ever ships.

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The order is the actual insight

What I keep thinking about is not the list. It is the sequence.

You do not just swap words. You fix the draft's bones first, cut the filler, verify the facts, then break the rhythm, then polish. Each pass strips a different layer of machine feel. Run them out of order and you end up polishing a draft that was structurally wrong to begin with.

That is also why a single "make this sound human" prompt never works. You are asking one pass to do five jobs.

Do this before your next publish

You can start today with nothing but the list.

Print the 12 tells and keep them next to your keyboard. Before you hit publish, scan for every one. That habit alone will move your writing noticeably closer to human.

Then layer in the passes. Draft in your own structure. Edit hard. Check your facts. Read the final version out loud. If a sentence feels like something you would never say to a friend across a table, rewrite it.

That last test does most of the work. Your ear catches what your eye skips.

What this cost me to admit

I went back through my own drafts after reading this and found four of the twelve. In one post I had used "crucial" twice in a paragraph about something that was, honestly, optional.

That stung a little, because I write for a living and I still could not hear it. Which is the whole point. The tells hide from the person who wrote them.

Tonight, open the last thing you published. Search it for three words: delve, crucial, seamless. Then read your longest paragraph out loud and listen for whether every sentence is the same length. Fix what you find.

AI writing is flooding every feed right now, and the people who stand out are the ones who sound unmistakably like themselves. That is a cheap edge, and it is sitting right there.