#03 - The three sentences your ghostwriter keeps deleting that are actually your voice.
And why they're the only ones the algorithm rewards.
I keep a list of the sentences my clients send me that I refuse to delete.
It’s a short list. Three patterns, repeated.
If you’ve ever worked with a ghostwriter, an editor, or a “content strategist,” you’ve watched them quietly remove these from your drafts. Not because they’re bad. Because they’re risky. And risk gets feedback, and feedback is what people get fired for.
Here are the three:
One: the sentence with a real opinion in it.
The one that goes “most founders are wrong about X.” Or “I’ve stopped doing Y.” Or “the standard advice on Z is, structurally, a way to avoid getting better.”
Editors smooth this into “many leaders consider Y” or “there are different perspectives on Z.” That’s not editing. That’s neutering. The sentence with the real opinion is the only one anyone disagrees with, and disagreement is the only signal the algorithm reads as a real conversation.
You don’t go viral by being agreeable. You go viral by being correct about something other people are quietly wrong about, in public, with your name on it.
Two: the sentence with the specific number, name, or moment.
“Last Tuesday a founder sent me a four-minute voice memo.” That’s a sentence. “Founders often communicate informally with me” is not.
The first one is true. The second one is a category. Categories don’t move. Specifics do.
Editors hate specifics because specifics can be checked. Checked sentences are scary. Vague sentences are safe. Vague sentences also do nothing.
The algorithm rewards specifics for the same reason humans do. Specifics are evidence. Evidence is the difference between a thought and a claim.
Three: the sentence that names the cause-and-effect.
“Your LinkedIn sounds like LinkedIn because your prompt was trained on LinkedIn.” Cause. Effect.
“There’s a complex set of factors influencing AI-generated content quality.” That’s the same sentence after it’s been put through three editors and a brand committee. It says nothing. It’s also impossible to disagree with, which means it’s also impossible to remember.
Cause-and-effect is what makes a post quotable. Quotable is what makes you the person they think of in a room you’re not in.
Three sentences. Real opinion. Specific evidence. Named cause-and-effect.
If you read your last five LinkedIn posts and count how many of those three you actually shipped, you’ll find your translation problem in two minutes.
Most founders are running about one hit per ten posts. The hit is always the post where the filter slipped. The filter slipped because something pissed you off, or made you laugh, or made you change your mind, and you wrote it before the editor in your head caught up.
The work is making the unfiltered version the default, not the accident.
That’s what this newsletter is for.
Sarra | The Ghost
The system I use to keep these three patterns in client work lives inside HauntOS my Skool community.