Keep It Human Kit

Martin Fowler calls it LLM voice: the moment readers sense a text was written by a language model, they stop reading. I asked Claude for a LinkedIn post, then asked it to make it sound human. It did. By inventing a story that never happened. This kit fixes both problems.

#1. The 10 tells of LLM voice

1. An emoji in the first line and a rocket in the last.
2. "The biggest lesson" or "key takeaway".
3. A thank-you list (classmates, professors, everyone who…).
4. Three adjectives where one would do.
5. "Not just X, but Y."
6. Ending on a question nobody asked ("What do you think?").
7. Hashtags stacked at the end.
8. General words instead of one detail ("a lot of late nights").
9. Every paragraph the same length.
10. No opinion, no edge, nothing you'd say out loud.

#2. Before and after (my real test)

First draft from Claude for "I just passed my machine learning exam":

Just passed my machine learning exam at university! [party emoji] ... What stuck with me most: the best way to understand a model is to build it yourself and watch it fail first. Every bug taught me more than any lecture slide. Thank you to my professors, my study group, and everyone who patiently listened to me explain backpropagation over coffee. Onward to the next challenge. ... #MachineLearning #AI #University #Learning

Then I asked: no emojis, no hashtags, no thank-you list, one specific detail. The result sounded human:

Passed my machine learning exam today. The thing that finally made backprop click was implementing it by hand in numpy on a Tuesday night, getting NaNs for two hours, and finding out I'd transposed one matrix. Now I can sleep.

Problem: none of that happened. I never told it about a Tuesday night, numpy or a transposed matrix. Asking for "a specific detail" made it invent one.

#3. The prompt that keeps it human and true

Rewrite this so it sounds like a real person wrote it on their phone. Rules: no emojis, no hashtags, no thank-you list, no "biggest lesson", max 3 sentences. Use ONLY the facts I give you below. Do not add any detail, event or feeling I didn't mention. If something is missing, write [ADD DETAIL] instead of inventing it.

My facts:
- [what happened]
- [one true, specific detail]
- [what I think about it]

The [ADD DETAIL] rule is the important part: it turns invented stories into gaps you fill yourself.

#4. 30-second check before you post

• Read it out loud. Would you say it like that to a friend?
• Is every detail true? Delete anything you didn't give it.
• Is there one specific thing only you could know?
• Cut the first sentence if it's a warm-up.
• Cut the last sentence if it's a question for engagement.

#Sources

• Martin Fowler, LLM Voice, 29 Oct 2026.
• My own test in Claude on 31 Oct 2026, the recording in the Reel (both answers copied word for word).

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