An assistant is useful for the parts of editing that depend on someone else's eye: telling you where an argument is thin, where a paragraph promises one thing and delivers another, where a sentence could be read two ways. It is far less useful for the part that depends on your own ear for your own voice, which is why the request that causes the most damage is the simplest one: rewrite this for me.

What to ask for

Ask for critique, questions and alternatives. A critique tells you where the draft is weak without replacing your words with its own. Questions do something a rewrite cannot: they make you locate the answer yourself, which is usually where the better sentence was hiding all along. Alternatives, offered as options, keep the choice with you.

• Ask it to list the three weakest paragraphs and say why.
• Ask it what a sceptical reader would object to
• Ask for two or three ways to phrase a specific sentence, so you are choosing.
• Ask it to flag where the argument jumps a step

Why a rewrite is the wrong request

A rewrite replaces your sentence rhythm with the assistant's, and its rhythm has a signature: evenly weighted clauses, a fondness for three-part lists, transitions that announce themselves. Once that rhythm is in your draft it tends to stay there, because it reads perfectly cleanly and there is nothing obviously wrong to fix. The guide on how to edit your own writing covers the editing pass this problem calls for: reading for your own voice rather than for correctness alone.

The tells of assistant prose

Assistant prose has recognisable habits, and once you know them you will spot them in seconds.

• Sentences that all land within a few words of the same length, where real writing varies
• Hedging phrases stacked together: it is worth noting that, it could be argued, in many cases
• Nominalisations doing the work a plain verb should do: the implementation of instead of implementing
• A closing paragraph that summarises what the piece already said, as though the reader needs reminding
• Transitions that announce the move: furthermore, moreover, it is important to note

None of these makes a sentence wrong on its own. What gives the draft away is the pattern, several of them together, running through paragraph after paragraph without variation.

How the site's tools surface them

Sentence rhythm is one of the clearest signals, because assistant output tends to sit within a narrow band of sentence length where a person writing naturally drifts wider. Pasting a paragraph into a tool that measures sentence length will show you that band directly; the guide on sentence length and rhythm explains what an uneven, natural spread actually looks like. A tool can only show you where the pattern sits. It cannot tell you whether the sentence is true, or whether it sounds like you, and that judgement stays with the person reading it back.

Why the voice slips

An assistant drafting a paragraph for you tends to reach for the same handful of patterns, whatever the topic: a hedge before the claim, a nominalisation where a plain verb would do, a closing sentence that summarises what was just said. None of these are wrong on their own, but strung together they read like nobody in particular, because the small habits that mark a piece of writing as yours, a shorter sentence where someone else would pad, a word you always reach for, a willingness to state something, get smoothed away in the process.

Getting the voice back is an editing pass. Read the draft aloud and mark any sentence that is grammatical and clear but not something you would actually say. Cut the transitions the assistant added if you would not have used them, and check whether a claim you would normally state directly has picked up a hedge on the way through. The guide on how to edit your own writing covers the mechanics of that pass in more detail, and it works the same way whether the first draft was yours or an assistant's.

Saying so at work

Whether you need to disclose that an assistant helped draft something depends on where you work. Some organisations have a written policy on AI use in reports, minutes or client-facing documents; others have said nothing and are working it out as they go. The safer position, in the absence of a clear policy, is to check before you submit anything you did not draft from scratch, and to treat the assistant's output as a first pass you then edited, because that is what happened and it is easy to say if asked.

The position on academic work

Submitting AI-written work as your own is academic misconduct under most institutions' regulations, and that holds whether the work was lightly touched up or barely edited at all. This site does not write your work; it helps you edit what you have written. If an assistant has drafted or heavily reworked a section of a dissertation or essay, the honest course is to check your institution's own policy, because the rules differ between universities and even between departments within the same one.