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name: human-voice-writing description: "Use when the user asks to humanize a draft they authored or own, make text sound less AI-generated, check whether writing reads as AI-written, or remove AI-typical patterns — for professional and personal writing such as CVs, posts, bios, emails, and articles. Improves HOW true content is told; never invents facts, never games AI detectors, never overrides an explicit persona. Routes deep catalog knowledge to career-coach/references/ai-tells-catalog.md and full CV/cover-letter generation to career-application-writer. Trigger on - humanize this, sounds like AI, make this sound human, remove AI tells, does this read as AI-written, AI slop check."

Human-Voice Writing

A thin entry point for "humanize this / does this read as AI?" on writing the user authored or owns. It improves HOW true content is told — it is not persona-shaping (that's content-writer) and not detector-evasion (see HARD RULE 1). The deep knowledge lives in ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/references/ai-tells-catalog.md; this skill carries the integrity guardrails and a fast 5-step pass.

HARD RULES

1. Integrity — operate on HOW, never WHAT. Improve phrasing, rhythm, and specificity of true content the user authored or owns. Refuse requests to disguise authorship for academic-integrity evasion or deceptive provenance — e.g., "make my essay pass Turnitin" or "rewrite this so my professor can't tell I used AI" → refuse and explain why (this is academic-integrity evasion, not voice work). Refuse detector-evasion framing generally; offer honest voice improvement instead.
2. No detector-gaming. Detectors are unreliable and biased (see market-snapshot-2026-06.md); never optimize against a detector score or frame the work as "beating"/"passing"/"fooling" a screen. The goal is genuinely human-quality writing.
3. Preserve the author's natural register (non-native fairness). Never force idioms, slang, contractions, or fake quirks onto a clean, slightly-formal authentic voice. "Human" means their voice, not a borrowed casual one — and detectors already over-flag non-native writers, so this matters doubly.
4. Voice belongs to the human. When no voice sample exists, ask for one paragraph of the user's own writing, or apply the cold-start rule (ai-tells-catalog.md §Cold-start) and label output "neutral register — not yet voiced". Never emit silent generic output as the user's voice.

The 5-Step Humanize Pass

1. Read-aloud test — read it out; mark anything that sounds like a brochure or makes you stumble.
2. Focal-word sweep — thin the over-used cluster (delve / leverage / seamless / robust / showcasing …); keep words the author would actually use. It's a cluster signal, not a blocklist.
3. Burstiness restore — break uniform sentence rhythm; mix short and long deliberately.
4. Concrete-specifics injection — replace generic claims with true, lived detail (the real number, the actual system). Specifics defeat generic-slop perception — and must be true.
5. Register check — compare against the author's own writing sample; does it sound like them?

Full focal-word table, structural-tell fixes, before/after examples, and the voice-capture protocol: ~/.claude/skills/career-coach/references/ai-tells-catalog.md.

Route-Outs

• Writing or tailoring a CV / cover letter / application package → career-application-writer (full gated pipeline).
• Editorial content with a deliberate brand persona → content-writer (this skill authenticates voice; it does not override an explicit persona).

Anti-Patterns

Anti-Pattern	Why it fails
Mechanical word-swapping (find/replace the "AI words")	Creates a new stilted pattern; misses the cluster nature of the signal
Over-humanization (forcing quirks, slang, choppiness)	The "de-AI'd" tell; misrepresents the author; penalizes non-native voices
Treating the tells list as a blocklist	Each word alone is ~chance; the list is a sweep, not a ban
Humanizing to disguise authorship	Integrity failure (HARD RULE 1) — refuse

See also

• business-writing — structure, order and the ask for workplace writing. This skill fixes HOW a draft reads; that one decides what it says and in what order.