Flagged passages first: put your free ~1,000 words where the report actually painted

When a Turnitin or iThenticate AI writing report lands, the reflex is to open the draft at page one and start “humanizing” everything. That is how people burn hours—and credit—on prose the report never marked.

This post is a worklist reading of the report, not a score promise and not a detection-evasion guide.

The painted span is the unit of work

Most institutional AI-writing exports show a highlight map over qualifying continuous prose. Lists, tables, captions, and reference blocks are often outside that map. The portal badge is a summary of a summary; the full PDF (or official export) is the worklist.

Practical order:

1. Download the full AI writing report for the same attempt you will resubmit.

2. Separate similarity from AI writing—they answer different questions.

3. Rank continuous-prose highlights by confidence / intensity.

4. Edit those spans first. Leave unflagged paragraphs alone unless they are factually wrong.

5. Freeze citations, verified numbers, formula objects, and claim strength unless the report itself painted them.

That order is report literacy. It is also how you stop rewriting a methods section that was never in scope.

Free crumb first, then fair billing (Track A shell)

Many polish tools bury pricing. HumanPen puts the free crumb up front, the same way honest SaaS demos do:

• New accounts get 100 free credits, which is about the first ~1,000 words of rewrite (≈ 1,000 words = 100 credits on the product page).

• After that, you pay for words you actually rewrite—not for every byte of an untouched chapter.

If you start with the highest-confidence flagged spans, those free ~1,000 words usually cover a realistic first pass on a chapter section—not a whole thesis wash.

What whole-document “humanizers” optimize for (Track B)

A common competitor shape is: paste the entire essay → one-click humanize → hope a private “human score” moves. That optimizes for throughput. It does not optimize for matching your institutional report’s paint map, keeping DOCX layout, or explaining to a supervisor which paragraphs changed and why.

HumanPen’s difference is mechanical, not magical:

Still-flagged spans after a recheck can follow the product’s free re-run wording toward * under 20% on the product page. That is a workflow statement about remaining flagged prose—not a guarantee any school will accept a badge, and not “undetectable.”

Five checks before you spend the free credits

1. Confirm file identity: attempt number, DOCX vs PDF, report timestamp.

2. Open highlights, not only the integer on the LMS card.

3. Skip gray / unscored / footnote-starred incompleteness until you understand the footnote.

4. Do not “fix” the bibliography by paraphrasing every citation line.

5. Keep a short note of which spans you changed—office hours go better with artefacts than with folklore.

Soft CTA

If you want a document-level loop—import the AI writing report, rewrite flagged passages first, keep citations and layout where possible, and use the 100 free credits ≈ first ~1,000 words—start at https://humanpen.net (hub: lnk.bio/humanpen).

No honest tool should be sold as a guaranteed pass.

— Charles Li · HumanPen · https://humanpen.net