Run a find-and-read pass. Type each suspect word into your find box and check every hit in context instead of fixing blindly. Then read the whole draft aloud, since your ear catches stiff phrasing your eye skips.
A scrubber speeds this up by highlighting the tells and suggesting plain replacements as you go, so you spend less time hunting and more time editing.
No. Word swaps are step one, not the whole job. You can replace every flagged term and still sound robotic if every sentence runs the same length and the structure stays flat.
Fix the rhythm too. Break up long sentences, let short ones stand alone, and cut stiff transitions. Vocabulary plus pace is what makes writing read as human.
Most detectors do not flag single words directly. They score patterns like predictability and sentence uniformity. That said, a page stuffed with delve, robust, and seamless raises the odds a detector calls it AI, because those words come with the machine-like patterns detectors measure.
Cleaning the vocabulary helps, but you also need varied rhythm to move the needle.
Swap for the plainest version you would actually say out loud. Leverage becomes use. Robust becomes solid. Seamless becomes smooth. Comprehensive becomes full. Delve becomes look into. Moreover becomes also.
The goal is not a thesaurus swap. It is to sound like a person talking to another person. Simpler almost always wins.
Models pick words by predicting what usually comes next, and their training data is full of formal, published prose where delve is common. The safe, average pick wins every time, so delve surfaces far more than it does in normal speech.
A person would say look into or dig into. The model reaches for the fancier option out of habit, which is exactly what makes it a tell.
The usual suspects are inflated verbs like delve, leverage, and utilize, empty adjectives like robust, seamless, and comprehensive, abstract nouns like tapestry and realm, and stiff transitions like moreover and furthermore.
These are not bad words on their own. They stand out because AI uses them far more than any person would. When several show up in one paragraph, the writing reads as machine-made.