Write like you

A few years ago, I could recognize a person or company by the way they wrote. Their style, their choice of words, their typos, their pacing; all were identifiers I had become accustomed to, similar to how you get accustomed to how your friend talks or dresses.

Almost overnight, however, some of these people and companies suddenly wrote in a whole new style. Short, impactful sentences. Attention-catching statements. One-sentence paragraphs. Emoji-driven lists. Zero typos and perfect grammar. Just like this.

As if the writer had become a different person. Or no person at all.

I noticed this was more than an individual occurrence. More people had started to sound... the same. The same, omnipresent AI-style. I found myself thinking that I'd rather read the original prompt than the polished output. I craved evidence of human effort.

From the individual's point of view, this might seem like an innocent development. Heck, some might even desire it. Write a couple of sentences about your idea, give it to an AI model, and a couple of minutes later you have content. Publish and move on.

In a business context, generating content might be financially beneficial, at least in the short run. If you can publish 50 articles in the time it used to take to write one, chances are your SEO/GEO game will improve, even if the content is generic.

But there's a catch.

Link to this headingWhy taste matters

The thing is, AI is a terrific booster for people with existing craft, skill, and taste, but a dangerous replacement for people without them. Outsourcing thinking, drafting, editing, and rewriting without skill or taste will lead to the rapidly growing middle ground of mediocrity.

Writing—or any form of creation—is supposed to be difficult. You need to struggle to get better. You need exposure and repetition. By outsourcing the difficult parts, you don't improve, however professional or convincing the results might appear. And when you don't improve, you stop developing the most important skill for judging the output: Taste.

We need more people with great taste, as style-wise AI models are prone to regress toward the mean. Taste is your leverage, your differentiator. Developing taste requires embracing frustration, but that's better than drinking the Kool-Aid.

I prefer personally written content because I genuinely believe it's better in the long term for both individuals and companies. While generated content might bring clicks and money, it will also contribute to making us and the world impersonal and dull—symptoms we're already suffering from.

Link to this headingTips for writing

To develop and write in your own style, here are some tips to consider:

• Think about what you want to say, and then write it. Take your time. It won't be perfect the first time, or the second, and it doesn't have to be.
• Write the way you speak. Read your writing aloud. Does it sound good? Does it sound natural? Does it sound like you? If not, rewrite. Pause on the parts that didn't flow naturally when spoken out loud. Think about why they didn't sound good.
• Read great literature. Start to decipher why they sound and feel good.
• Read a book on writing. You'll get far with The Elements of Style, and even further with On Writing and On Writing Well.
• Write first, edit second. If you stop to edit along the way, you'll get stuck. It's fine if your content has only one good sentence. That's better than no writing.
• When you get into the habit of writing, don't hesitate to use tools to help with grammar and structure. For example, I use Grammarly, but I often disagree with its suggestions, especially in stylistic matters where they conflict with the way I want to write and sound. One benefit of these tools is that they teach good conventions. For example, if I see a red underline in my text, I almost always already know what the suggestion is.

Remember, your style is better than a generic style. Not despite, but because of its personality, style, and flaws.

Write like you.