Unlock the Secret to Writing Human-Like Content That AI Can’t Imitate—Without Losing Quality!

When I wrote my last article on how to avoid sounding like AI, I knew I would probably publish several pieces because there are just so many ways to come at the topic. In that post, I discussed how you can write like a human by injecting subjective experience and personal opinion into your pieces, as permitted by your genre.

This time around, we’ll focus on a signal of human writing that’s a little trickier to get right: personal voice. Learning how to develop a unique voice and infuse it into your writing takes practice, and it’s not something you can master overnight.

However, there are a few practical steps you can take to get started — and the end result is more than worth it, as your reader won’t just be able to tell you’re not some soulless chatbot. They’ll be able to tell you’re you!

What is a voice, anyway?

Everyone automatically thinks of a soprano with blonde braids and a Viking helmet belting her heart out onstage whenever they hear the word “voice” (or maybe that’s just me). So you might not immediately picture how the concept of voice relates to your writing. It’s super important, however.

In the context of writing, voice is a term used to describe the individual personality of the author or character, which shows up through their tone, word choices, syntax, sentence structures, etc.

Authors can have more than one voice, depending on which genre they’re writing in and whether they’re writing in-character.

For example, my novel’s protagonist is also the narrator, so let’s take a look at how she says the following sentences, referencing her husband:

I wondered what might be troubling him. I hadn’t expected he’d feel shame about his treatment of me, but perhaps I was wrong. Maybe all his remoteness and deception and ungentle conduct were weighing on him at last.

Now, let’s see how I might write the same basic concept in a hypothetical autobiographical scenario where my real husband hasn’t been acting his best:

I didn’t understand why he was so upset, but I figured it might be because we’d…