Write like you

A few years ago, I could recognize people by the way they wrote, for example, on LinkedIn. Their style, their choice of words, their pacing; all were identifiers I had become accustomed to, similar to how you get accustomed to how your friends talk or dress.

Almost overnight, however, the same person who yesterday wrote in their own style, with its flaws, mannerisms, and typos, today writes in a whole other style. And not in any style, but AI-style. Short, impactful sentences. Zero typos. Perfect grammar. Attention-catching statements. One-sentence paragraphs. As if the writer had become a different person.

Or no person at all.

Scrolling through the content, I noticed this was not an individual occurrence but a pattern. After a while, 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—heck, even desired—development. I get it. Give an AI model a couple of sentences, and minutes later, you have content ready to be published. If everyone is creating content at the speed of light, you might feel like dropping out of the game if you're not drinking the Kool-Aid.

But by outsourcing our writing, we also hide our personality, our flaws, our style, and our thinking. We hide ourselves.

I understand that not everyone wants to reveal their personality in their writing. That's natural, and probably even more natural in a corporate context. We want to blend in, and AI handles that for you.

On the other hand, when creation is as easy as clicking a few buttons, you become obsolete. In the context of writing, the question is: What's left to distinguish you from the rest if your style is identical to whatever everyone else is producing?

Link to this headingWriting like you

Even with the obvious risk of sounding old-fashioned, I think writing—or any form of creation, for that matter—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 the results might appear. To feel good about ourselves, we want a sense of achievement. To do that, we need to embrace frustration.

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

• Write without help. Try to think about what you want to say, and then write it. Take your time.
• Write as you speak. Read your writing aloud. Does it sound good? Does it sound natural? If not, rewrite it. Pause on the parts that didn't flow naturally when spoken out loud. Think about why they didn't sound 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 know what the suggestion is.

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