Rewrite a flagged essay so it actually sounds like you.

About: Rewrite guide

Let's be straight about what this page is and isn't. It is not a guide to defeating AI detectors. Detectors improve faster than obfuscation techniques do, and the tactics that "work" this month won't work next month. If your goal is to submit AI-generated text as your own work, this guide will not help you, and the rest of the site is on the teacher's side of that transaction, not yours.

This page is for a different case: your draft, for whatever reason, reads as generic or AI-like, and you want it to sound like you before you submit it. That case includes essays you wrote entirely yourself that flag anyway, drafts where you used AI for brainstorming or grammar and the voice drifted, and essays you've revised so many times the voice is gone.

Six rewrite moves

1. Vary sentence length. AI-generated prose is more uniform than human prose. Look at your draft. Are most sentences 14–22 words? Break two or three down to short declaratives (5–8 words) and stretch one or two out (30+ words, with commas). Variation is what "burstiness" measures.
2. Cut one abstract noun per paragraph. "The implementation of the policy" → "the policy." "An analysis of the situation" → "the situation." Abstract nouns are a default AI pattern. Human writers use them too, but in lower doses.
3. Add one concrete, unfakeable detail. A place name, a date, a specific book you read, a person's first name. AI drafts lean toward generic ("the author argues," "the study shows"). Specific details anchor the writing to you.
4. Use your normal vocabulary. If you wouldn't say "utilize" in conversation, write "use." If "moreover" is not in your voice, delete it. This is where revising-through-polish erases voice: each revision pass nudges word choice toward formal default.
5. Let one sentence be a little weird. Not a typo, deliberate. A fragment for emphasis. A dash instead of a comma. A one-word paragraph if the moment calls for it. AI output is relentlessly well-behaved; a small stylistic risk is a marker of voice.
6. Read it out loud. The sentences you stumble over reading are the ones that don't sound like you. Rewrite those, not the ones that read smoothly.

What not to do

• Don't add typos. Your teacher or admissions reader will notice before the detector does, and typos don't fool modern detectors anyway.
• Don't paste into a "humanizer" tool. Humanizer tools that promise to rewrite AI output to evade detection are an arms race we do not participate in; see our humanizer ethics policy. If the text should be yours, make it yours by rewriting, not by piping it through another model.
• Don't swap words one-by-one from a thesaurus. Thesaurus-substitution produces prose that reads as more AI-like, not less, because it preserves the sentence structure while pushing vocabulary into low-frequency territory.

If your essay was entirely AI-generated

The rewrite moves above will not reliably clear a modern detector, and the arms race is not winnable at the student-vs-institution scale. The move that works is the one this guide won't script for you: open a new doc, re-read the assignment, and write what you actually think. It is slower. It is also the thing that holds up.