TL;DR: Telling AI to sound “natural” or “warm” doesn’t work. Two testable constraints do, one for sentence habits, one for word choice.
Piling adjectives onto a prompt is like telling a chef to make food “taste good.” It’s a feeling, not an instruction. The model cannot measure “authentic.” It cannot detect “warm.” It has no way to know when it crosses from clear into stiff, or from direct into robotic. So it defaults to what it was trained on: corporate clarity, hedged claims, and sentences that sound like they came from a style guide nobody asked for.
The fix isn’t more adjectives. More adjectives give you more of the same problem. The fix is giving the model a test it can run on every sentence before it hands the text back to you.
The Prompt
Rewrite this so it reads like one person explaining it to another. Write at an 8th grade reading level. Short sentences. No filler. Cut any phrase I wouldn’t say out loud. Keep the meaning, lose the performance.
[paste text]
That last line matters. “Keep the meaning, lose the performance” is the signal that stops the model from overcorrecting into casual slop. You’re not asking it to dumb things down. You’re asking it to strip the theater out. There’s a difference between simplifying an idea and diluting it, and that instruction holds the line.
Why It Works
Each constraint is solving a different problem.
“Cut any phrase I wouldn’t say out loud” is a filter the model can apply sentence by sentence. Would a real person say “furthermore”? No. Cut it. “It’s worth noting”? No. Cut it. “Could potentially”? Gone. “In today’s fast-paced landscape”? Gone before you finish reading it. This one sweep catches filler transitions, hedging stacks, and all the performative phrasing that makes AI output feel like a corporate memo.
The reason this phrase works specifically is that it shifts the test from abstract to behavioral. “Sound natural” is abstract. “Would I say this out loud?” is something you can actually check. The model runs that question against each phrase and the answer is either yes or no. There’s no gray area to hide in.
“Write at an 8th grade reading level” handles word choice separately. It kills “utilize,” “facilitate,” and “leverage,” words nobody uses in actual conversation but AI reaches for constantly. It also kills sentence constructions that are technically correct but exhausting to read. Long subordinate clauses. Passive voice stacked on passive voice. Sentences where the subject doesn’t show up until the third line. Simple words sound like a person. Complex words sound like a machine trying to impress you.
These two constraints do not overlap. One is about the phrases you cut. The other is about the words you choose when you keep something. That’s why you need both. A piece of writing can have short, common words and still be full of filler transitions. And it can be stripped of filler but still lean on ten-dollar vocabulary. Together, they cover the whole surface area of the problem.
Two constraints. Two different problems. That’s the whole system.
Use Cases
- ✍️ Final-pass editing on blog posts or newsletters before you hit publish. Especially useful when you drafted with AI and can feel the robot still sitting somewhere in the copy.
- Cold emails where stiff phrasing kills your reply rate before the reader gets to your offer. People decide in the first two sentences whether this feels like a person or a template, and most cold emails fail that test immediately.
- LinkedIn posts where “thought leadership” language makes people scroll past without stopping. The irony is that trying to sound authoritative usually makes you sound less credible, and this prompt fixes that without you having to diagnose where it went wrong.
- Landing page copy that needs to convert. Formal phrasing creates distance, and distance kills trust before the reader ever reaches your CTA.
Prompt of the Day
Rewrite this so it reads like one person explaining it to another. Write at an 8th grade reading level. Short sentences. No filler. Cut any phrase I wouldn’t say out loud. Keep the meaning, lose the performance.
[paste your text here]
One note on how to use this: don’t paste in something you wrote from scratch and expect magic. This prompt works best as a finishing pass. Draft first, however you normally draft. Then run it through. The model is better at editing toward clarity than generating it cold, because it has something concrete to work against. Give it your draft and a clear test to run. That’s the setup where this actually delivers.
If you’re working with longer pieces, break it into sections and run each one separately. The model holds the constraints better on a focused chunk than it does across 1,500 words at once. You’ll notice the quality difference immediately.
Take the last thing you published and run it through this. If it comes back shorter and clearer, you just found your new final-pass habit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What if I need formal tone for business writing?
Those filler words actually do show up in professional writing by real humans, so the prompt might overcorrect for your audience. The key is using the ‘wouldn’t say out loud’ test as your main filter, then adjusting formality to match where you’re publishing. It’s about sounding natural for YOUR context, not casual everywhere.
Q: Which part of the prompt actually does the work?
The ‘wouldn’t say out loud’ test is the survivor users report actually works. It catches filler, hedging, and performative stuff. The reading level constraint handles word choice separately (kills ‘utilize,’ ‘leverage’), but the spoken-aloud test is the real filter.
Q: Does this work for technical or specialized writing?
The 8th-grade reading level breaks when precision matters because you lose meaning trying to dumb it down. Instead, use: ‘Use the simplest accurate word.’ This keeps technical precision while cutting jargon and gives you clarity without losing the specifics.
Q: Is sentence length really that important?
Yes. AI defaults to stacking medium-length sentences back-to-back, and that’s a rhythm problem. Real writing varies: a 4-word sentence next to a 22-word one. Add this instruction: ‘Vary sentence length. Mix short, medium, and long.’ That rhythm shift often matters more for human feel than word choice alone.
Simple prompt to make ChatGPT write like a human (no more AI-sounding text)
by u/promptTearDown in ChatGPTPromptGenius