Fair point on the skimming. I definitely let the scenic route take over in this one; Ironically, getting lost in the weeds is how I found the voice!
I love the idea of using it for structure only. My fear was that if AI touches the structure, it inevitably sanitizes the voice too. But there's probably context I can provide to avoid that.
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.
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.
I love the idea of using it for structure only. My fear was that if AI touches the structure, it inevitably sanitizes the voice too. But there's probably context I can provide to avoid that.