In my last installment in this series, I discussed how you can avoid coming off as AI by injecting subjective experience and personal opinion into your pieces, as permitted by your genre.
This time, 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 because your reader won't just be able to tell you're not some soulless chatbot. They'll be able to tell you're you!
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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 spent the last several weeks fighting like a pair of junkyard dogs down to the last bite of kibble. Maybe he was finally ready to admit he was the cause of a good 90% of our issues.
As you can see, these phrases were written by the same author (me) and discuss the same basic idea, but they have two distinct voices. The first is a character living in the 16th century, and the second is closer to how I normally talk.
It all comes down to the choices of words I make (antiquated vs modern) and the tone I take (formal vs casual). In this case, I didn't even alter my sentence construction all that much. I didn't have to. The tone and vocabulary shifts were sufficient to alter the voice.
If you practice this enough, it will become second nature, to the point you don't even think about it anymore.
Ways to showcase your unique style
Crafting a voice in the age of AI can depend a lot on the way you speak. It used to be that the general advice was to avoid writing the way you talk in favor of conforming to standard English. That way, you’d sound like the smartest smartypants on the block and, as a bonus, everyone would be able to understand you, regardless of dialect.
Well, that advice is out the window now. If you want to sound human, you have to write like a human – and that means making some changes to the standard advice from 2022 and back in order to create your own voice. You can do this in a number of ways.
Keeping it casual is your new best friend. AI has a very hard time sounding informal and breezy, so every time you can, let your writing style relax. I know some genres (like research papers and journalism) don’t allow for this, but blogging sure as hell does. So use more slang words and a more casual tone when you write personal essays.
Show your personality through sentence structure. Break up your sentences into complex, compound, simple, etc. LLMs tend to have a uniform phrasal construction, so including variety – and developing a pattern of variety unique to you – is a big way to distinguish yourself from AI.
Make sure every word you use contains substance, regardless of what the words are or how many there are. Bots tend to be wordy and use flowery vocab, but in a monotonous and predictable way. They somehow shit out a whole sesquipedalian word salad without actually saying anything. So the more substance you include, the better. This is especially true if you want to use a fancier tone or a more advanced vocabulary.
Speaking of vocabulary, go for unusual words, too. For example, you don’t tend to see AI borrowing words from other languages, unless they’re commonly used, and you don’t see AI using regional idioms a whole lot. So go for the kinds of local linguistic flairs you might use in regular conversation. Include regional colloquialisms or nonstandard words that are standard in your dialect (ain’t, yonder, fixin’ to, y’all, and reckon are biggies in mine).
Unusual punctuation can also be a fun way to make yourself stand out. Consider latching onto particular pieces of punctuation in most or all of your writing. Having your own sets of favorite marks might just help distinguish you from other humans as well as AI. I myself love parentheses, so if you see a piece that has a lot of them, it might just be me who wrote it.
Consider profanity (where appropriate), as well. Chatbots will almost never lace their writing with profanity of any kind unless prompted. ChatGPT won’t do it at all unless you Google specific workarounds to make it swear. Even when you trick it into cursing, it still has a hard time using foul language in a way that sounds natural rather than awkward and goofy, like a kid whispering “fuck” for the first time.
Sarcasm and humor are other ways to inject humanity into your writing. Chatbots suck the big one when it comes to successfully deploying these conventions, so every chance you get to crack a joke or be a total wiseass, go for it (again, in genres where it’s acceptable).
Also consider flip-flopping from person to person, using second and third and first smoothly. AI has a very hard time with this, so if you can naturally move between talking directly to your audience to talking about yourself to talking about others, you’re more likely to successfully convince your reader that you’re human.
Stylistic conventions that appear in poetry, such as weaving in a few rhymes one or two times or applying alliteration, can also help distinguish you from AI, since its ability to use these conventions in prose is particularly poor (not that it generates good poetry or anything).
Of course, every single one of these voice-building suggestions won’t be appropriate for every genre, but if you learn how to use them effectively, and use several of them consistently in each category you write in, you’ll be able to distinguish yourself from AI slop regardless of genre conventions.
Up Next
If you’ve been feeling like your confidence has taken a hit since ChatGPT came out, I hope this article helps remind you that you can indeed outwrite LLMs. All you need is a human voice.
Next time, we’ll talk about what is potentially my all-time biggest pet peeve in the whole “writers trying to make themselves sound human” mess: breaking grammar rules in all the wrong places. Stick around.
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