Writing with It

"Write an article about X." What comes back is smooth, orderly, and instantly recognisable: the balanced lists, the openings about how the modern world is changing rapidly, the conclusion that restates the introduction, the studied absence of any sentence the author could be blamed for.

By now you know exactly why. The default output is the median of everything written on the topic, shaped by training toward the answer people rate as inoffensive. Medians don't have a voice. That's not a fixable prompt problem — it's what a median is.

Hand over the text and you hand over the thinking. Hand over the work around the text.

Writing is not the transcription of finished thoughts. It's how the thoughts get finished — the reason a paragraph you can't write usually marks an idea you haven't settled. Delegate the writing and the thinking quietly goes with it, which is why for most people writing sits on the "goal skill" side of the line from article 12.

The measured version of the problem

In 2024, Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser published a study in Science Advances with a result worth memorising. People writing short stories with AI assistance produced work that was judged more creative and better written — individually. But across the whole group, the stories became measurably more similar to each other. Individual quality up, collective diversity down.

That's the trade in one sentence. If your writing exists to be adequate — an internal notice about the parking arrangements — take the median and be glad. If it exists to be yours, the same gravity that raises the floor also pulls you toward the middle, and you have to work against it deliberately.

Before the text: where it's genuinely strong

This is the underused half, and it's where the model helps most without touching your voice.

Interview yourself. The single best move in this whole article: "I'm writing about X for this audience. Ask me the fifteen questions whose answers you'd need to write it well." Then answer them — out loud, sloppily, in note form. You've now produced the raw material that only you have: the specifics, the examples, the opinions. Most weak writing isn't badly written; it's under-supplied, and this fixes the supply.

Structure from your own material. Hand it your notes and ask for three possible arrangements with the logic of each — not to be told what to say, but to see options for the order.

Find the holes before you write them. "Here's my argument in five bullets. Where does it not follow? What would a sceptical reader object to? What am I assuming without saying?"

After the text: the strongest use of all

Editing your own writing is hard for a reason: you can't unsee your intention, so you read what you meant instead of what's there. An outside reader fixes that, and this is a reader available immediately, repeatedly, at three in the morning.

Ask for diagnosis, not rewriting:

• "Where does the reasoning jump? Mark the exact sentence where a reader loses the thread."
• "Which paragraph could be deleted with no loss? Which sentence is doing the least work?"
• "Where do I claim something without support?"
• "Read this as a hostile reviewer and give me the three strongest objections."
• "Summarise what you understood the main point to be." — Brutally effective. If the summary isn't your point, the text is the problem, not the reader.

Notice the shape: every one of these returns information about your text rather than a replacement for it. You keep authorship; you get a reader.

Keeping your voice

If you do want generated prose, the difference between recognisable slop and something usable is entirely the material on the desk.

Not "write in my style" — that points at nothing. Instead: ten paragraphs of your actual writing, plus a plain description of your deviations ("I start with the conclusion; no rhetorical questions; short sentences when it matters; I'd rather be blunt than warm"), plus a counter-example of the register you hate.

Then edit at the sentence level, not the block level. Accepting a whole paragraph is how a text turns into someone else's; accepting individual phrases while rewriting the joins keeps it yours. And read the result aloud — the median has a rhythm, and your ear catches it faster than your eye.

The mechanical work: take it freely

None of this applies to the parts of writing that were never the point. Delegate without hesitation: translation, register shifts, formatting, cutting a text to a word count, generating twenty headline options, checking terminology consistency, turning notes into a clean summary, adapting the same content for three channels. This is transformation work on material you supplied — the most reliable category there is.

Responsibility

The text goes out under your name, so its errors are yours. Extract the atoms from article 10 — figures, names, dates, quotes, links — and check them before publishing; polished prose makes wrong facts more persuasive, not less. And where disclosure is required — academic work, journals, some client and coursework contexts — the rule is the institution's, not yours to infer.

In practice

Interview yourself before writing. Fifteen questions, answered roughly, and you have material nobody else has.

Use it as a reader, not a writer. Ask where the reader gets lost, what can be cut, what's unsupported.

Ask it what it understood your point to be. Fastest structural diagnostic there is.

Never accept a whole paragraph — edit at sentence level and rewrite the joins.

Read the final text aloud. The median has a sound.

Delegate the mechanics freely and guard the thinking.

Check yourself

Close the article and answer in your own words:

1. Why is generated prose recognisable, and why isn't that a prompting problem?
2. What did Doshi and Hauser measure, and what's the trade it describes?
3. Why is "interview yourself" more valuable than asking for a draft?
4. What distinguishes editing questions that help from ones that just produce a rewrite?
5. Why does "summarise what you understood my point to be" work as a diagnostic?
6. Why edit at sentence level rather than accepting paragraphs?

In short

• The default output is the median of everything written on the topic — smooth, competent, voiceless. That's what a median is, not a prompt to be fixed.
• Doshi & Hauser (Science Advances, 2024): AI-assisted stories were individually better and collectively more similar. The floor rises; the spread narrows.
• Writing is how thinking finishes, so for most people it's a goal skill — delegate the work around it, not the text itself.
• Before writing: interview yourself for material, get structural options, find the holes in the argument.
• After writing: use it as a reader. Where does it jump, what can be cut, what's unsupported, what did you understand my point to be.
• To keep your voice: paste your own writing, name your deviations, give a counter-example, edit sentence by sentence, read it aloud.
• Delegate mechanics — translation, formatting, cuts, headline options, consistency — without hesitation.
• Fluent prose makes wrong facts more persuasive: check the atoms before it goes out under your name.
• Hand over the text and you hand over the thinking. Hand over the work around the text.