AI Writing: How to Spot, Check and Edit It

This section is where a draft gets read slowly before anyone decides what to do with it. Awesome Highlighter started in 2008 as a way to point another person at the exact passage on a web page that mattered, and that is still the core of how to edit AI writing: before you rewrite anything, you find the sentences that need attention and you mark them so the reason is visible. This section collects the methods for doing that with drafts that a chatbot wrote, helped write, or may have written.

The work happens in four passes, and each has its own page. First, highlight. The signs of AI writing worth highlighting covers the patterns readers notice, from uniform sentence rhythm to stock openers, and the buzzwords and stock phrases to mark lists the vocabulary that corpus studies found rising after 2023. The page on the em dash explains why one punctuation mark became a talking point and what its presence does and does not prove.

Second, mark. A highlight says where; a mark says what. Marking up an AI draft before you revise it sets out a small key of marks for claims to check, sentences to cut and passages to rewrite, and the proofreading marks chart gives the standard editor's marks for the same jobs, so that a teacher, an editor and a writer can read each other's pages.

Third, check. Some marks are questions about sources, and some are questions about authorship. Checking a single paragraph for AI writing explains what reading checks and detector scores can and cannot tell you about a short passage, and a fair markup process for suspected AI writing is written for teachers who need to raise a concern without accusing a student on the strength of a score. The longer background on detectors is in what AI text detectors can and cannot tell you, and claims in a chatbot answer get their own routine in annotating a chatbot answer before you trust it.

Fourth, fix. A marked passage is a to-do list. Rewriting highlighted passages so they sound like you walks through a manual rewrite first and then shows where a rewriting tool fits, and the ranking of AI humanizers compares the tools on documented features for writers revising their own drafts. If a tool helped, say so: how to disclose AI help in your writing has example sentences.

These guides connect to the rest of the site. The marks you make are also a record: building an authorship record and using version history as evidence show how drafts and highlights answer questions about who wrote a piece. And when you want to show someone the exact sentence you mean, the highlight link generator makes a link that opens the page with that sentence highlighted, with nothing stored.