28 Machine sounding drafts need a style guide first

What people usually ask

Rewrite these ten procedures in my style.

What comes back

Ten drafts of one shape: an opening hook, smooth transitions between steps, a tidy last line, and none of them reads like the person who wrote the originals.

Ask this instead

First:

Do not draft anything yet. Attached are two procedures I wrote myself and a notes file of what reviewers corrected in earlier machine drafts.
Build style_guide.md from these only. Rules, one per line, each with the line in the two documents it came from. Cover sentence length, how a step opens, how a warning is worded, how numbers and units are written, and the words that never appear.
If a rule you find conflicts with something in the notes, stop and ask me which wins before writing it down.

Then:

Review style_guide.md three times, once each as an editor, as a technician who follows these procedures on the floor, and as a new hire reading them for the first time. For each seat, list the rules that are unclear, missing or in conflict.
Then apply the guide to procedure_07.docx only. Return the draft with each changed sentence tagged with the number of the rule it followed. Leave the other nine untouched.

Attach: Two procedures written by the reader and the critique notes; then style_guide.md once it exists.

Why it works: Rules drawn from the reader’s own documents replace the model’s default shape, and one procedure at a time shows whether the guide holds before the other nine are touched.