how do you prompt chatgpt so drafts don't sound like chatgpt?

tell it who's reading and what you want them to do afterwards. vague prompts get the generic voice. "write a 150 word email to existing clients saying prices go up in march, keep it blunt" comes out far more human than "write an email about our price increase". and ask for it shorter than you need. it pads.

Write the rough version yourself, even as messy notes, and ask it to tidy that up rather than write from scratch. It keeps your phrasing and your opinions, and those are what it can't fake. If it has to write from scratch, paste in two or three things you've actually written and tell it to match the sentence length and tone. Also give it a short banned list (delve, landscape, game-changer, "in today's fast-paced world", and that habit of ending every paragraph on a summary line). Then do one editing pass yourself. No prompt fully gets rid of the rhythm, the last 10% is always you.