Why not to humanize technical documentation
Usually you should not. Documentation is repetitive by design — the same structure in every entry is what lets a reader find one line in a hurry — and rewriting it for variety destroys the property that makes it work. The exception is prose sections, not reference sections.
Typical length · Anything from a 200-word reference entry to a 5,000-word guide, with very different answers for each. · Last reviewed 16 August 2026
Before and after
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After
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Nothing, deliberately. Every parameter in a reference table should read identically to every other one, because a reader scanning forty of them is relying on the shape being the same. Varying the phrasing here is the edit that makes the document worse.
Repetition is the feature
A reference section is a lookup table made of sentences. Someone arrives knowing what they need, scans for it, reads one entry and leaves. The identical shape of every entry is what makes that fast — same order, same phrasing, same place for the default value — and it is invisible until it is gone.
Rewriting for variety attacks precisely that. Forty entries each individually improved and no longer parallel is a document where the reader has to actually read to find anything. The prose got better and the tool got worse.
This is also the clearest case where predictable writing is correct and a detector reads it as machine-like. The document is supposed to be predictable. That is a problem with using detection on documentation, not a problem with the documentation.
Where a rewrite does earn its place
Conceptual pages, getting-started guides, migration notes and troubleshooting narratives. These are prose, they are read start to finish, and they suffer from all the usual faults — throat-clearing openings, uniform sentence length, abstraction where an example belongs.
The best edit in this category is usually the same one as everywhere else: cut the paragraph explaining what the section is about, and start at the thing the reader came for. Documentation is unusually full of those, because they feel responsible to write.
What must never go near a rewriting tool
Code samples. Parameter names, types and defaults. Error codes and their messages. Version numbers. Anything a reader will copy and paste.
The failure here is worse than a clumsy sentence, because it is silent and it is downstream. A rewritten default value or a helpfully corrected parameter name produces documentation that looks authoritative and does not work, and the person who finds out is a user debugging their own code against your page.
If you run anything through a tool, exclude the code blocks first and diff the result before publishing. That is a general risk with any rewrite; in documentation it is the whole risk.
Consistent terminology beats varied vocabulary
General writing advice says avoid repeating a word. Technical writing says the opposite: pick one name for each thing and use it every single time, because a synonym introduces a second concept in the reader's head.
This is where an automated pass is most quietly damaging. Reaching for a variation on the third mention is exactly what a rewriting tool is built to do, and in documentation it means your authentication token has become an access key halfway down the page and a reader is now searching for a thing that does not exist.
Formats with the same problem
Product descriptions — the other format where invented specifications reach users as fact.
Blog posts — the prose half of most documentation sites, where a rewrite genuinely helps.
Questions
- Should documentation ever be run through a rewriting tool?
- Prose sections, yes — guides, concepts, troubleshooting. Reference sections, no. The value of a reference entry is that it is shaped like every other one, and improving each entry individually destroys that.
- Our docs get flagged as AI-written. Does that matter?
- Not in any way you should act on. Documentation is formulaic because the format requires it, which is exactly what a perplexity-based detector reads as machine-like. Rewriting to lower a score would make the documentation worse for its actual readers.
- What about generated first drafts of documentation?
- Common and often reasonable, with the same caveat as anywhere else: a model will produce a plausible parameter list, plausible defaults and plausible error codes, and plausible is not the same as correct. Every fact in a generated reference entry needs checking against the implementation.
- Does consistent terminology conflict with readability advice?
- Yes, and technical writing wins that argument in its own domain. Repeating a term is correct here even though a general style guide would flag it, because a second name for one thing costs a reader more than a repeated word does.
What to watch for
- Never let a rewrite touch a code sample, a parameter name, a default value or an error code.
- Rewriting reference entries breaks the parallel structure readers scan by, even when each individual entry reads better.
- Terminology must stay consistent. A tool reaching for a synonym on the third mention is introducing a second name for one thing.
If your writing gets flagged
Rewriting for rhythm and specificity tends to lower detection scores, because that is what detectors read as human. It is not a guarantee — detectors disagree with each other and change without notice, and we do not promise a result from any of them.