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.

It felt 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. 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. 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.

However, here's the catch: When AI-style content generation is as easy as clicking a few buttons, you start becoming obsolete as your role as the author diminishes.

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

Link to this headingDeliberate use

Before you drink the Kool-Aid and jump on the high-speed content creation bandwagon, bear in mind that you also risk hiding your personality, your flaws, and your style. What's more, you outsource your thinking.

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 on the surface.

All of this doesn't mean you shouldn't use AI. Quite the opposite: Developing your skills develops taste, the most valuable skill in the AI era. 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 it's worth it.

Link to this headingTips for writing

To develop and 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. It won't be perfect the first time, and it doesn't have to be.
• 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 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 know what the suggestion is.

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