If You're Going to Write With GenAI, Flip the Script

Writing is one of the most fundamental and important skills we learn.

It touches nearly everything we do. Why else would it start during our earliest years? It's a representation of language, of communication, two of the few things that are universal across cultures.

Great writing is also synonymous with great thinking. Even ideas that are entirely visual at the end often start with writing.

It's hard, but it's supposed to be. Hard things shouldn't have easy buttons. Writing is a skill honed on lots and lots of reps. And when you start outsourcing those reps entirely, you're going to harm your ability to write AND your ability to think. You'll also exchange the satisfaction of a craft's finish line for…nothing.

I'm imploring anyone who reads this to think critically, use your human brain and your experiences to create original thoughts. When it comes to writing (and other creative output) GenAI can remix to the average but freshness is few and far between.

Once you do that, then GenAI might help.

There is a common refrain that has worn me down to nearly nothing after a few years of hearing it repeatedly. I'm paraphrasing many, but it goes something like:

"I used GenAI to write, but with human oversight. I take what it did and I edit it."

By approaching your writing this way, you are removing the most original and human element—translating your thoughts, your vision, and your voice into words. Once you let GenAI go first, you've already suppressed the originality and style that make writing so important.

So, here's a better workflow, one that preserves all the critical parts of you, keeps you sharp, and taps into the creative inside all of us.

1. Aggregate information and outline

When not hallucinating, generative AI did change the game on how we aggregate information and learn concepts. Sure, it increased the speed of gathering, but the true boon was the organization and how it was presented to us. The way GenAI writes to try and "teach" you is also far less sloperific than if you ask it to write. That distinction is important.

With your source content aggregated and potentially outlined, you can start creating.

2. Write, just keep writing

If you learn from what you've read and feel a spark, just start writing. Write anything, write a stream of consciousness about the topics you're covering that fires you up. Write down words or fragments that you feel good about. Write until you have a noticeable surplus of paragraphs and you feel the spectrum of points you want to make is covered.

Don't concern yourself with refinement. It's not about that. Rather, it's about topic coverage and making sure the bulk of your voice is represented and you're writing things that feel alive and feel yours.

You'll be amazed after this how many paragraphs and blurbs you love.

Just a note before we continue: contrary to popular belief, you don't need to outline first. This step can precede outlining, or you can fold outlining into step 3 instead.

3. Prompt for editing that doesn't touch the qualitative

Step away for 30 minutes to an hour.

When you're back, it's time for generative AI to lend you a hand and support you with some probable and necessary tightening for your pile of words. If you did steps 1 and 2 correctly, you're going to have a surplus of ideas, paragraphs, and sentences. You'll probably have a hierarchy that might not be perfect and things that flow weird or are just downright whacky.

Prompt GenAI with lots of specificity to help you with the following and be very very explicit that it shouldn't change or even weigh in on voice and tone. That's the bedrock of this being a human creation and not a piece of slop. By setting these prompts up to avoid doing anything with certain elements of style, you let GenAI lean into something it's pretty good at.

1. Prompt to assess content hierarchy along with redundancy. This makes sure that your high-level organization is at its best, that it can make sense to a reader and position what you're saying to have the largest impact. While parts of hierarchy are a creative choice, there is a lot of logic in how you make those decisions.  When you combine an assessment of your fundamental hierarchy along with possible redundancy, you'll be well on your way to trimming the excess weight off your writing.
2. Once trimmed and organized well, prompt to check your mechanics. Writing mechanics are your spelling, punctuation, and formatting. Just make sure it doesn't get research paper rigid with its help because chances are, you're not writing one. Combing through this helps ensure clarity. It's shocking how unclear things can get when this is all over the place.
3. Now that you have a tightened, mechanically sound piece of writing, prompt to help refine syntax. There is a needle to thread here though. Syntax is your sentence variety, so GenAI's assessment needs to be narrow, simply pointing out spots where your sentences may be redundant. If you let it make suggestions with too much freedom, you'll run the risk of getting GenAI tropes back. Keep the guardrails HUGE. Most of the time simply pointing out the repetitive sentence structure is enough information for you to inject some variety yourself.
4. Lastly, work with it to look at your diction (word choice). Because you're not letting a terrible writer like GenAI have complete control of your qualitative output, you've focused it on just simply making suggestions. It can literally see if your word choice enters areas like overusing passive verbs, repeating the same word too much, or losing the specificity and resonance of things you're saying. Using all the world's information to make those assessments is essentially risk free but can spark you to either replace a word with a suggestion because you determined it makes sense or find some of your own replacements. It's also helpful to check whether your metaphors and symbolism map to your voice. Even if you're asking for replacement suggestions, you're only asking for fragments rather than whole sentences or paragraphs. It's still easy to avoid GenAI's trash writing with this setup.

Remember, you can always override generative AI…it's just easier to do now than if the damn thing wrote from scratch for you. The suggestions it makes at this stage will have a much higher chance of either being helpful immediately or point you in the right direction for a final decision.

Proofread and finalize

Walk away for 30 minutes again.

Now you've had your machine editing companion do things without sacrificing your soul, it's time to flex your brain matter one more time. Comb through your work and double check all the things above. Because you spent so much time tightening with another pair of (fake) eyes focused on only things it's kind of good at, this last proofread shouldn't take too long.

Try it, please

It may not seem like it now, but I promise you this reverse workflow is not only going to produce better writing, it's going to make you feel more fulfilled.

Quite frankly, this approach should scale down to the everyday stuff you write too. Your emails, your slack messages, comments for your coworkers or clients: same exact principle. (GenAI writing emails is its own epidemic that needs to go away).

Does this process take longer than sending a prompt and copy/pasting whatever comes back? Probably. That's the cost of creating something that's yours. The GenAI-only version is faster because it deletes the part where you think, but that's the part that matters.

Remember though, the middle road isn't a time saver either. Back to the refrain I can't shake: "I used GenAI to write, but I edited it, I oversaw it." It's meant to justify the process and the output. You're not writing when you edit that draft; you're untangling the choices an advanced autocomplete made on your behalf. The end result lands somewhere between just passable and the weird high-end of generic—which will still take longer than creating something yourself.

That's why you flip the script; it makes the work yours from the first word

So, try it on the next thing you have to write. Make a messy pile of words, walk away, and then tighten with GenAI. You'll probably find a few lines you're really proud of and you'll remember writing every one of them. That's going to create quality and satisfaction too many are forgetting about right now.