Module 4 · Lesson 4.2

Your Words, Openers and Quirks

2 min read · Updated

Two people can write about the same topic, with the same facts, and you'd still know who wrote which. The difference is in small things: the words they reach for, how they start a thought, the odd habit they never noticed. AI editing tends to sand these off. This lesson is about keeping them.

Make three short lists

Using the pieces from your audit, write down:

1. Words you use

Ten to twenty words or short phrases that show up in your writing and feel like you. Everyday ones count. "Sorted", "a bit", "honestly", "the thing is", "fair enough". Field-specific words count too, as long as you use them naturally.

2. Words you'd never use

Words that make you wince when you see them in a draft with your name on it. This often overlaps with the AI banned-word list, plus a few personal ones. Maybe you hate "reach out" or "per my last email". Write them down.

3. Your quirks

Habits of structure and punctuation. Some common ones:

  • Starting sentences with "And" or "But"
  • Asides in parentheses
  • Rhetorical questions
  • One-word sentences for emphasis
  • Numbered lists for anything with more than two steps
  • A signature way of signing off

Your openers

How you start a piece says more about your voice than almost anything else. AI drafts tend to open in a few standard ways: a broad statement about the world, a definition, or a restatement of the request.

Look at how you start. Most people have one or two default openings. For example:

  • The point first: "We need to push the launch by a week."
  • A story: "Last Tuesday a customer called us in tears."
  • A question: "What would you do with an extra day each week?"
  • A blunt opinion: "Most onboarding emails are too long."

Tell the AI which opener you use, or write the first sentence yourself and let it continue. Lesson 2.2's voice brief is the place for this.

Protect your quirks during editing

Here's a trap. You write a rough draft in your own voice, then ask AI to "polish" or "improve" it. What comes back is smoother, and it sounds less like you. The model treats your quirks as mistakes and fixes them.

Two ways to avoid it:

  1. Ask for suggestions, not rewrites. "List any grammar mistakes or unclear sentences. Don't rewrite anything." Then fix them yourself.
  2. Name what to keep. "Keep my sentence fragments, my parentheses and my casual words like 'a bit'. Only fix actual errors."
A grammar tool that rewrites whole sentences can make your writing look more like AI output. If you've ever been flagged by a detector for something you wrote yourself, an over-eager grammar checker is a common reason. See lesson 6.3.
Try this

Write your three lists. Then take an AI draft and do one pass where you only swap in your words and add one quirk per paragraph. Read it aloud. It should already sound noticeably more like you. Next, lesson 4.3 adds the part AI leaves out completely.