Author here. I’ve published several articles on my Substack recently, but I hit a wall when readers called me out for sounding "AI-generated". Even though the ideas were mine, I was letting Claude handle the prose, and it kept defaulting to that unmistakable "AI accent"; especially the obsession with em-dashes and those perfectly symmetrical paragraph structures.
I tried a different approach to fix this: I had Claude interview me for 30 minutes to reverse-engineer a "style guide" based on my actual speech patterns. I expected a professional set of rules; instead, I got a catalog of my own neurodivergent ticks and a weird tendency to argue with myself mid-sentence.
Style is pretty much a set of neurodivergent ticks. having a cohesive style requires understanding them so you don't argue with yourself mid sentence, unless you have a good reason to do so which works towards your style. The lack of being neurodivergent is the lack of identifiable style and essentially AI.
NarratorTD•12m ago
You just summarized my entire post better than I did.
That distinction between "unintentional mess" and "intentional style" is exactly what I'm trying to figure out. I think I've been treating my ticks as bugs for so long that I forgot they were actually the only unique data points I had."
NarratorTD•1h ago
I tried a different approach to fix this: I had Claude interview me for 30 minutes to reverse-engineer a "style guide" based on my actual speech patterns. I expected a professional set of rules; instead, I got a catalog of my own neurodivergent ticks and a weird tendency to argue with myself mid-sentence.
Here is the raw Style Guide (Gist) if you want to see the specific constraints I used to "humanize" the output: https://gist.github.com/Narrator/2bd64351e3dc79a08118cb67ca7...
ofalkaed•23m ago
NarratorTD•12m ago
That distinction between "unintentional mess" and "intentional style" is exactly what I'm trying to figure out. I think I've been treating my ticks as bugs for so long that I forgot they were actually the only unique data points I had."