Name: 5 Ways A.I. Is Making Your Writing Worse (and 5 Ways It's Making Your Writing Better)
Uploaded: 2026-03-11T15:19:21.000Z
Duration: 7 min 44 s
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Modal verbs - A2

Artificial intelligence can make your writing a little bit better, but

The comparative

I'm a New York Times best selling author and writing instructor@howtoritebetter.org and today we're talking about artificial intelligence, when to use it in your writing and when not to.

I'm going to talk to you first about the five ways that AI is making your writing worse.

Well, the first one is you're going to sound like everyone else.

And if that's what you're trying to be as a writer, then so be it.

If you're just trying to get emails out there that sound okay, that's fine.

But if you want to be a writer with a unique voice, AI is not going to get you there.

The second way AI is making your writing worse is, well, it's an inauthentic voice.

It's not your voice, it's someone else's voice.

It's not exactly plagiarism, but sometimes it feels like that.

If you want to be a compelling writer, you want to express yourself and communicate things to an audience, you want to do so in your voice.

The third way that AI is making your writing worse is you don't know why you're using the words or the punctuation you're using.

The machine is just spitting it out for you.

So you're not actually learning about an EM dash or a semicolon.

When should I use this type of punctuation?

When should I make a sentence, a run on sentence?

How do I focus on pace or tempo that makes my writing uniquely mine, but

You know, I see this all the time with writing.

Whether it's my own writing students or it's just blog posts, all the writing starts to look the same.

They're using EM dashes in the same place or they're using comparatives.

They're saying, this joke isn't just funny, it's hilarious.

But that pattern is not yours, it is someone else's.

The fourth reason AI is making your writing worse is it's too perfect.

But when is the last time you sat down and were eager to crack open the pages of AP Calc or Trigonometry never.

The writing in it is technically perfect.

AI writing is also technically perfect, but

it lacks a soul, it lacks the expression, it lacks that artistic vibe that you want to communicate with your writing.

Finally, and most important, the fifth way that AI is making your writing worse.

You haven't had to drudge through the drudgery.

I teach my writing students that all of the payoff is on the other side of the drudgery.

You know that feeling after you've spent a long day composing that blog post, or maybe that chapter for a book, or maybe a really important email to a business client?

You know, you've spent a lot of time on it, and afterward, it feels so rewarding.

But if AI does it for you, you don't get the reward because you haven't put in the effort.

You haven't earned the payoff because you haven't sacrificed anything.

And also, let's face it, you haven't grown.

You haven't gotten any better as a writer.

then I hire a bunch of carpenters to build things for me, I'm never going to be a carpenter.

I'm simply someone who is paying a carpenter.

And the same can be said for AI in our writing.

I've identified five ways that AI can actually make your writing better.

The first way that AI makes my writing better is proofreading.

Let's face it, for years I have used AI or computers to check my spelling and grammar.

It's not writing for me, it's showing me where my errors are.

And the second way that AI is improving my writing is through research.

Quite often there are times where I want to know more about a particular topic.

Or maybe I want some facts about a thing that I'm writing about.

We used to go to Google and start to read through all of these articles, but

As long as I know how to prompt ChatGPT or Claude or any of these other AI services, I can ask it specific questions and it will give me specific details.

It's not writing for me, but I can use those details in my own composition.

The third way that AI improves my writing is feedback.

I could take a whole essay, or, let's face it, I could take an entire book that I've written and I can upload it to AI and it will tell me where my gaps are, where My errors are.

It will even make some suggestions to potentially improve the writing.

Now, I don't have to take any of those suggestions, but it does help me get some clarity.

It's like having a proofreader there for me, a clean pair of eyes that can help me better understand my own failings and what I want to incorporate into a final draft.

The fourth way that AI improves my own writing is through outlining.

Now, I encourage my writing students to write their own outline for their books or term papers or for essays they want to write.

But then you can upload that outline to AI and it can show you if you've missed anything before you get started on the project itself.

Finally, the fifth way that artificial intelligence helps my own writing.

This is my favorite, is technical writing or contract writing.

Let's face it, AI is kind of a bad writer, but so are contract writers.

Most of the contracts I have to read from attorneys or studios or publishers.

Surprisingly, they're not that well written.

There's a lot of jargon and technical nonsense in these contracts.

And whenever I need a contract, the first place I go now is to AI and what I do is I get the contract I want, I give it the prompts that I want to put in there, and

then I take that contract, which is usually written pretty poorly, but

it's probably written better than what an attorney would write.

But then I take that contract that I get from AI And I still run it by an attorney.

It saves the attorney time as well, which ends up saving me money.

Would you be surprised if I told you we made this entire video using artificial intelligence?

I'd be surprised, because I wouldn't do that.

Just like AI Makes my writing worse because I'm not putting in the work or the creativity, it makes our other creations worse as well.

If you'd like some more writing tips, download my free ebook.

It's over at howtoritebetter.org you can read it in less than than half an hour, and

you will walk away with 15 tips on how to improve your writing today.

And I'll tell you, not a single one of them encourages you to use AI to improve your writing.