Does my writing sound like AI?
Most people asking this are not using a model. They read a lot of text a model wrote, and some of the rhythm rubbed off. Paste a paragraph below and we will point at the sentences that carry those marks, and name the mark.
Why a draft you wrote yourself can read machine-made
Style is contagious. If you spend your day in docs, tickets and client emails, you absorb the shapes in them. Three of those shapes end up in everyone's writing:
- The wind-up. A sentence clearing its throat before the point: "Here's the thing", "What matters is", "The truth is". One writer uses it once. A hundred thousand writers use it every day, so it reads like a house style.
- The balanced contrast. "It is not just a tool, it is a way of working." The second half repeats the first with a louder adjective. This shape is easy to generate and hard to stop once you notice it.
- The expensive noun. Robust, seamless, holistic, leverage. Each one replaces a concrete word with a vague one, and vague words are what a reader means when they say a text sounds like nobody wrote it.
None of these marks prove anything about who wrote the text. They mark the places where a reader stops hearing a person.
Six things we look for
- Wind-ups before the point. "Here's the thing", "Let's be clear", "It comes down to".
- Contrasts that balance nothing. "not just X, but Y", where Y is X with a bigger adjective.
- Words that sound expensive and say little. robust, seamless, holistic, leverage, pivotal, vibrant.
- The actor hidden behind the verb. "The report was written by the team" instead of "The team wrote the report".
- Sentences of one length. Four in a row that take the same breath, so the paragraph has a pulse instead of a rhythm.
- A debate with nobody. "But you might ask…" followed by an answer to a question no reader asked.
What this page is not
It is not an AI detector, and we do not score authorship. Detectors guess from statistics and are wrong in both directions: they flag careful writers and miss machine text that was edited by hand. A style check is a different question, and a more useful one. You can read the exact rule set and its limits before you paste anything.
Your text is not stored. The check runs in memory, the result comes back to your browser, and the row that records the check holds a counter and nothing else.
If the check comes back with flags
Two things help, in this order. First, cut the phrase and say the thing without it; most flags disappear at that step. Second, if the paragraph still reads flat, rewrite the shape rather than the words: shorter sentences, one concrete detail, and the person who did the thing at the front of the sentence.
Our own rewriter does the second part for you on the first 300 words, free, and the full rewrite runs on text up to 1,000 words.
Paste a few hundred words. You get the flagged sentences with a reason for each, then the opening rewritten in your own voice — free, no account.
If you want the long version of why this happens, we read the threads where people describe it: what Reddit says about writing that sounds like AI.
Questions people ask
Does a flag mean the text was written by AI?
No. A flag means one sentence uses a pattern that machine text uses far more often than people do. People use the same patterns, especially after reading a lot of machine text. The flag is about the sentence, not the author.
Why did a paragraph I wrote in 2019 come back clean and a new one did not?
The checker looks at patterns, not dates. The newer paragraph probably picked up a wind-up, a balanced contrast, or a word like robust that you would not have reached for in 2019.
Can I use it for a school essay or a work document?
Yes for both, and the check is free for 30 pastes a day. What you do with the result is up to you: we do not report anything to anyone.
Do you keep what I paste?
No. The text is processed in memory and dropped. We keep the email address if you choose to sign up, and a one-way hash so the same draft cannot be rewritten twice for free.
Is there a version that reads a whole document?
Not yet. One paste takes up to 20,000 characters, about 3,000 words, which covers most chapters, blog posts and reports.
Next: what the checker does and does not do · the words that give a text away