[NarratorTD]

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.

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]

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]

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.