How to Make an Email Sound Human, Even When AI Wrote the First Draft

Why AI emails are easy to spot

Most people now read a few AI-written emails a day, and they have learned the pattern without trying. The opening thanks you for reaching out. The middle has three tidy points of the same length. The end hopes this helps and offers to answer any questions.

None of it is wrong. It just does not sound like anyone. When an email does not sound like anyone, the reader starts to doubt that a person read their message and thought about it, and they reply less.

You do not have to stop using AI to fix this. Edit the draft the way you would edit a new colleague's first attempt: cut the padding, add what only you know, and make it sound like something you would say out loud.

Cut the first line and the last line

The opening and closing of an AI draft are almost always filler. Delete them and read the email again. Usually it works better.

Lines to delete on sight:

• "I hope this email finds you well."
• "Thank you for reaching out."
• "I wanted to take a moment to..."
• "I hope this helps!"
• "Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions."
• "Looking forward to hearing from you."

Start with the reason you are writing. Stop when you have said it. "Thanks," and your name is plenty for a sign-off.

Add one thing only you would know

A chatbot only knows the words you gave it. You know the rest: the call last Tuesday, the number the client pushed back on, the fact that the launch already slipped once.

Add one detail like that and the email stops reading as generated. "Following up on our conversation" becomes "Following up on Tuesday's call, where Priya asked about the onboarding fee." It is a few words longer, and it is the part the reader will remember.

Stop grouping everything in threes

AI loves lists of three: "fast, reliable and secure", "your time, energy and focus". It also loves bullet points that start with a bold label and a colon.

People do not talk like that. If you have two points, write two. If you have one, write one. Turn bullets back into sentences unless the reader really needs to scan a list, like dates, prices or file names.

Swap the words people never type

Some words almost never show up in an email someone typed in a hurry. When you see them in a draft, swap them.

Fix the punctuation

The em dash, the long dash, is the best known tell. AI drafts use two or three per paragraph. Most people never type one, because there is no key for it. Replace each one with a period, a comma or a pair of brackets. We wrote a whole post on em dashes if you want the details.

Other tells: exclamation marks on routine news, semicolons in a two-line email, and every sentence being about the same length. Real writing has short sentences next to long ones.

One more that is easy to miss: text copied out of a chat window can carry invisible characters. You cannot see them in the compose box, but some email clients and spam filters can.

Read it out loud

This is the oldest editing trick and it still works best. Read the draft out loud as if you were saying it to the person across a table. Cut anything you would never say ("I trust this message finds you in good spirits"). Wherever you run out of breath, split the sentence.

A before and after

Here is a typical AI draft replying to a client who asked when they will get their files.

Here is the same email after five minutes of editing.

The second one has a date, a reason and an offer. It is half the length and it sounds like Tom.

A quick checklist

Before you send an email that started as an AI draft:

• Delete the first and last line and see if you miss them
• Add one detail from your own context
• Replace any word from the table above
• Turn every em dash into a period, comma or brackets
• Read it out loud once

Let a checker catch what you miss

Nobody reads forty emails a day out loud. That is what Presend is for. It checks every email and message when you click send, in Gmail, Outlook, Slack and the other places you write, and flags phrases that read like a chatbot wrote them, lines that do not sound like you, and hidden characters pasted from a chat window. It does not rewrite anything for you. It points at the line, and you decide what to do with it.