Choosing tone and humanness: a decision guide

title: "Choosing tone and humanness: a decision guide" description: "A reference table by content type — what tone, domain, and humanness to pick for what you're writing." date: "2026-05-13" tag: "Guide" author: "Inksong"

Seven tones, six domains, a humanness slider from 0 to 100. That's 4,200 combinations on paper. In practice, you don't need them all — most users settle into four or five presets that match the kinds of content they actually write. This guide is the reference table we wish we'd had when we started: what to pick for what you're writing, with reasoning attached.

The mental model

Three controls, three different jobs.

Tone sets the register — formal vs. casual, academic vs. conversational. It's a categorical choice. Picking academic doesn't make the rewrite more aggressive; it shifts the style of the output toward formal academic prose. The seven options (balanced, academic, pastoral, casual, professional, creative, journalistic) cover most writing contexts.
Domain controls vocabulary discipline. Pick the domain matching your content (academic, legal, pastoral, medical, marketing, technical) and the rewrite respects domain-specific terms — it won't paraphrase "supersedes" into "replaces" in a legal document, or "patient-reported outcome" into "what patients said" in a medical one. Domain also influences which transitions and structures the model preserves.
Humanness is the volume knob. It controls how much rewriting happens, not what kind. At 0, the rewrite is minimal. At 100, the rewrite is aggressive — entire sentences restructured, vocabulary widened, rhythm reshaped.

Tone and domain are categorical. Humanness is continuous. Get the first two right and humanness becomes a fine-tune.

By content type — a reference table

The settings below are starting points. Adjust humanness ±10 for your taste; tone and domain are usually solid as listed.

Content type	Tone	Domain	Humanness	Notes
Academic paper / thesis	academic	academic	40	Preserves hedging, formal register.
Research grant proposal	academic	academic	35	Lower humanness; reviewers expect structure.
Literature review section	academic	academic	45	Slightly higher — review prose can be drier.
Sermon	pastoral	pastoral	50	Preserves theological vocabulary and cadence.
Pastoral newsletter	pastoral	pastoral	55	Slightly more conversational than sermons.
Marketing blog post (B2B)	balanced	marketing	60	Professional but de-AI'd. Don't use `casual`.
Marketing blog post (consumer)	casual	marketing	70	Punchier, more informal, voice-led.
Email sequence	balanced	marketing	65	Slightly higher than blog — emails read fast.
Landing page hero	professional	marketing	55	Lower humanness; copy is dense, every word counts.
Product documentation	professional	technical	35	Low humanness — clarity over voice.
Legal contract	professional	legal	25	Very conservative; precision is everything.
Medical patient communication	professional	medical	45	Plain-language but respect medical terms.
Fiction draft (literary)	creative	academic	70	Yes, academic domain — preserves literary vocabulary.
Fiction draft (genre)	creative	marketing	75	Marketing domain is fine; preserves character names.
Personal essay	creative	academic	65	Pair with a voice profile from your own writing.
Translated English text	balanced	(match source)	60	Pick domain by content; translation often reads stiff.

If your content doesn't appear above, the heuristic is: match domain to vocabulary discipline, match tone to register, set humanness to 50 and adjust.

The humanness curve

Each band of the slider does a meaningfully different job. Knowing which band you're in matters more than the exact number.

0–25 — Very conservative rewrite. The model touches AI tells only when they're severe. Preserves "therefore," "furthermore," "moreover" if they read natural in context. Sentence structures mostly survive. Use this when the document is mostly fine and you only want to take the edge off — legal contracts, technical specs, formal correspondence.

26–50 — Standard rewrite. Removes most AI tells. Restructures the worst offenders — over-hedged sentences, uniform sentence lengths, transition-heavy paragraphs. Keeps your register intact. This is the default band for most professional writing: academic, technical, formal marketing.

51–75 — Aggressive rewrite. The model is willing to restructure paragraphs and reshape rhythm. Register can shift slightly toward conversational, especially without a voice profile pinning it. Best for content where voice matters more than precision: blog posts, essays, fiction, consumer marketing.

76–100 — Informalize meaningfully. The output reads conversational and casual. Expect to lose formal voice. Use only when you actively want casual prose — Twitter threads, friendly emails, very consumer-facing content. Above 90, the rewrite gets bold enough that you should always pair it with a voice profile.

Voice Profile + humanness interaction

A voice profile changes the math.

Without a profile, higher humanness drifts faster. The model has license to restructure prose, and "what voice should the result have" is left to defaults. By 70, you can feel the register sliding toward generic-conversational.

With a profile, the constraint flips. The profile fixes your sentence-length distribution, hedging rate, vocabulary specificity, and n-gram patterns. Humanness now moves rewrite aggressiveness without dragging voice with it. You can go higher on humanness — 70, 80, sometimes 90 — and still land in your voice rather than a generic one.

This is the main reason we recommend training a profile if you have any meaningful sample of prior writing. It widens the usable humanness range. For team workflows, a shared voice profile lets multiple writers humanize at any humanness and end up at the same brand voice.

What to do when output reads wrong

A few diagnostic patterns:

Output reads generic, no character. Add a voice profile. This is the single fix for "well-humanized but not me."
Output reads too informal for the context. Drop humanness by 15–20. If that doesn't help, switch tone from balanced to professional or academic.
Technical terms got paraphrased. Switch to the matching domain (legal, medical, technical, etc.). If your content doesn't match any domain cleanly, technical is the safest default for term preservation.
Formatting drifted — headings shifted, lists broke. That's not tone or humanness; it's a format-pipeline edge case, usually with unusual DOCX styling. Report it and we'll look.

Wrap

For voice profile setup, see Setting up Voice Cloning.