Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 5: Editing

The average business or technical writer does not tend toward deep research and practice in rhetorical theory when editing. But those who do not know a sentence from a citrus fruit or a punctuation mark from a pumpkin would do well to ask AI to edit their messages before pressing send.

AI will not let you down when it comes to writing grammatically flawless sentences. It usually knows where periods and commas go, and it can help you to achieve plain language, if that's what you're aiming for. Enough research shows that AI can close the gap between limited English proficient writers and their native English-speaking counterparts. 

But grammatical propriety ain't everything. I wouldn't depend too much on AI for three critical areas of writing: style, tone, and content.

Style. You might prefer writing in a certain style, for instance, exclusively using active or passive voice. If you are an informed writer, you can dictate these stylistic wishes to AI, but you won't get something that seems like your style. 

Tone. While AI is quite good in writing proper sentences, it is weak in determining the proper tone based on your audience and the business situation. You will have to figure that out on your own based on your professional experience and situational awareness.

Content. Whenever I ask AI to edit a passage for me, it overreaches. For instance, I recently asked it to edit a passage for plain language. It changed the word permanent to for a long time. There is a difference in meaning, which AI is still inadequate in detecting. 

You'll have to detemine whether AI is doing the right thing. Only you know what you really want to say. Don't let AI take over the writing situation completely.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 4: Revising

After drafting a rough copy of a business-critical document for a broad audience, a wise writer would run it through three rewriting steps: revising, editing, and proofreading. In short, when revising, we consider the content itself and the structure. Editing requires us to look at the fluency, clarity, and conciseness of the sentences; the word choice, punctuation, and spelling; and usage rules, such as capitalization, abbreviation, and numeration. During the proofreading step, we search for overlooked errors, such as typographical errors, spacing inconsistencies, and font irregularities. This post focuses on AI's effectiveness in revision.

We hear the word editor and proofreader much more than we hear the word reviser. When I use the word, many people will ask me, "Is there such a word?" It's just as well that we don't use the word much. An editor can edit someone else's manuscript, and the same goes for a proofreader. The fresh eyes of an editor and proofreader can detect opportunities to improve the quality of the language or fix mistakes. But writers should revise because only the writers know what they're trying to get across. They know the story they're trying to tell. Writers should know better than anyone else what information should be deleted, moved, or added to get their point across.

For this reason, I would not recommend AI to skilled writers for revising. They should know the content that goes into their message. For instance, if you were to write an accident investigation, you might think that a chronological approach would work. You would mention the cause of the accident and then the effect, followed by the response and mitigation plan. But skilled writers know the most important pointsto start with are the human and property damage. AI would know all of this, of course, so it would be useful to novice accident investigators. Moreover, most organizations require investigators to use a prescribed template for accidents, so using AI may be pointless.

But AI can give good revision advice if, after writing an internal proposal or evaluation report, you ask it questions like, "Should I delete anything? What should I add? Is the order of ideas all right?" It will give you helpful ideas to consider. As long as you remember that you, not AI, are in charge, you will find it useful during the revision step.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 3: Drafting

The last post suggested that planning is all about creativity. This post is about drafting, which concerns productivity. Of course, creativity is involved in drafting, but efficient writers know a rough draft is all they need to shape the message to its finished form. Speed is paramount.

A lot can go wrong when using AI during the drafting step of the writing process. You might direct your AI assistant to create a first draft of the complete document based on the plan that it generated and you tweaked, only to get something entirely different, or with little more substance, or with off-point content, or a rearranged story line depending on the words you choose in your prompt. Sometimes AI can kill your forward progress. That's why you should save every version of your document.   

Lessons Learned:

• Master the prompt. Language variables are infinite. The slightest change in a prompt can yield entirely different results than expected. Make note of your prompts to adjust them when you do not get what you want.
• Seek output, not perfection. This tip is a general one regardless of whether you use AI. I subscribe to the adage "less is more," but not during the first draft. Completeness first, conciseness second. Make sure you get all your need for the quality control phase of writing. 
• Provide sufficient context to humanize the message. Create a style that sounds like you, not a machine. Reading aloud your writing, or AI's generated content, will help you gain a fluent voice during the editing step.

You always write the first draft for yourself; you revise, edit, and proofread for your target audience. These quality control steps are the focus of the next three posts.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 2: Planning

Undoubtedly, AI is a spectacular information giver during the first step of the writing process, planning. It instantaneously provides an overload of content within five seconds of a prompt. "Provide a seven-day itinerary of the Amalfi Coast avoiding the most touristy spots ... Create a list of ideas for a proposal to eliminate the New York City congestion tax ... Generate talking points for an appeal to management for a two-day-a-week remote work schedule ..." I was pleased with AI's results for all these prompts. In each case, I immediately received information in what would have taken me hours or days to gather and organize without AI's help.

But I did not accept any of these collections as comprehensive. Some of the information was irrelevant, excessive, insufficient, vague, unorganized, or premature. In no case was I ready to write a rough draft. Each situation demanded that I plan some more. 

Lessons Learned:

• Determine the reader's concerns. Reflect on what your audience needs to understand your topic or make an informed decision—and by extension, what AI needs to know to give you what you want to write.
• Phrase prompts specifically. For examples, the Amalfi Coast request could have included the time of year and personal interests, the congestion tax proposal could have mentioned the concerns of the New York State governor, and the remote work appeal could have noted the types of affected jobs. 
• Decide on the best structure. AI lays out easily scannable information, but you must choose the structure that works best for your case.

It may be inaccurate to call AI creative; information collector would be a more precise term. Yet its ability to generate loads of content for us so quickly can spark new ideas for us as we review its results. We just need to remember that AI is merely a super-fast assistant, but we are the writer. 

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 1: Overview

Writing has become a lot easier thanks to artificial intelligence. Maybe too easy. Now that I have taught my course Using AI as Your Writing Assistant more once, I have come to realize that it is just one more tool to separate the haves from the have nots. 

In this seven-part series, I will describe how to use and not use AI based on my research, writing, and teaching experiences with this technology. I will cover each step of the writing process to uncover the indisputable benefits and veiled drawbacks of using AI. Throughout this series, I will explain how AI contributed to these posts.

For now, consider how AI is pervasive in the workplace. Recent figures, according to AI, which I believe to be gross understatements, claim:

• 75% of knowledge workers globally use AI at work.
• 21% of all U.S. workers say they do some of their work with AI.
• 74% of content professionals use AI at least weekly.
• 39% of content professionals use AI daily for writing, editing, and creating content.
• 82% of businesses use AI writing tools for content creation in some capacity.
• 61% of employees want AI tools to help them specifically with writing tasks.
• 90% of tech workers are using AI in their job.
• 78% of AI users bring their own AI tools to work without company oversight.

Considering these figures, we need to get on board with using AI to enhance our on-the-job creativity, productivity, and quality. The next posts will show you how.

So What's Really New?

How do we decide what to teach schoolchildren? Why?  How do we know what we teach them works?

Maybe you have sought answers to these questions, as I have. If so, you might want to read my article, "The Educational Philosophy of Quintilian" in Philosophy Now. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35-95 CE), better known as Quintilian, laid out an educational philosophy two millennia ago that remains profoundly influential to academics and scholars worldwide.

You've heard the expressions "The more things change, the more they stay the same" and "There's nothing new under the sun."  When it comes to education, these maxims are true. Sure, information technology and artificial intelligence may  obscure the fact that we continue to borrow from our ancestors, but only briefly. Read the article and you'll see what I mean.

It Is What You Say! Part 2

In a 2018 WORDS ON THE LINE 14-part series on tone, which I'll summarize here, I showed how you can look at tone from many persepectives. 

A good start is to define tone, which I see as the writer's attitude about the message, the reader, or both. Next, consider the consequences of a bad tone, which can ultimately escalate to losing your job. (I know of instances when it happened.) Then consider the many influences on tone, including those you can control and those you have little control over. Finally, practice ways of checking your tone, which may mean whether to respond at all and when to respond. Coming into play are word choice, salutations, complimentary closings, opening and closing sentences, sometimes apologizing, avoiding negative language,  making your words and not emojis speak for you, and maintaining positive relationships.

It may be true that tone is not about what you say but how you say it, but when it comes to writing, the words we use substitute for our speaking voice. So watch what you write.

It Is What You Say! Part 1

When it comes to speech, you often can take to the bank the adage, "It's not what you say; it's how you say it." We appreciate a beloved friend embracing us while boisterously asking, "How the hell are you?" or blurting even stronger expletives. We don't mind when a trusted advisor renders the harshest of criticisms: "You walked into that one ... You blew it this time ... You look awful." They're looking out for us. We consider those criticisms expressions of love.

Not so with writing. The most well-intentioned feedback by email can appear to the receiver like acerbic, maybe abominable, condemnation. A written message beginning with a dozen specific praises of someone's work performance followed by one minor observation for improvement can seem like a gratuitous attack.

Why does this attitude emerge invariably in writing but less so in speech? Five reasons immediately come to mind:

• Relationship – It's one thing getting a tough message from a respected teammate bit something entirely different getting one from an inconsequential vendor, distant client, argumentative peer, lackadaisical subordinate, or feared manager.
• Context – Once we press send, we should realize that our reader is not in the same place—both physically and emotionally—as we are. Our fast-paced environment might affect our tone; their quiet, isolated environment might affect theirs. We might be in a positive mood; they might be in a negative one. 
• Visualization – We cannot see the person's facial expression as they deliver the criticism. We miss their slight smile of empathy, their lowered tone for gravity, their direct eye contact of supportiveness. 
• Time – Someone says something to us and it's one and done. But the passage of time will help us see the tone of a written message in varied ways as we develop. That direct approach might soften or harden, depending on our perspective. That email we orginally interpreted as sweet may within a day or two seem soured by cynicism or sarcasm. One thing for sure: while spoken words may be forgotten, written ones will always be there as a reminder of the hurt.
• Interpretation – Most importantly, words connote different things to different people. I have gotten into trouble with people for using the nouns convert and situation, words whose negative connotation escapes me. Go figure. I consistently tell people in my writing classes that whether we like it or not, meaning comes from the reader, not the writer.

Why does striking the appropriate tone matter? To be continued ...

Useful Articles for Developing Writers

I have been getting a lot of requests for online reading material on writing improvement. My answer is usually, "Just search 'writing skills at work' or 'how to improve work-related writing,' or a thousand other variations of those prompts." I also mention this blog, WORDS ON THE LINE, which has been recommending numerous helpful sources over the past 21 years. Here are three solid advice pieces, previously unmentioned on this blog: 

1. An Indeed article, "11 Ways to Improve Your Writing (with Examples)," offers the usual, but still valuable, tips on purposefulness, content development, formatting, voice, and other stylistic devices.  
2. "How to Improve Your Writing Skills at Work" by Etelka Lehoczky on the Forbes website goes a bit more off the beaten path. This brief primer proves a correlation between confidence and efficiency.
3. The Articulate Marketing website suggests positive and proactive practices in "Concentration: 22 Ways to Help You Focus on Writing." It serves several off-beat tips to spark creativity and sharpen focus that just might work for you. 

You can also browse WORDS ON THE LINE for topics such as the six-part series on writing confidence, an eight-part series on summarizing successfully, a seven-part series on reading for writers, and hundreds of other posts on writing best practices.

Watch What You Say to AI

What I might have mistaken for Artificial Intelligence's sense of humor is, in fact, its inability to infer. Wait wait: AI cannot have a sense of humor. What was I thinking? 

Seduced by AI

AI's casual responses to my requests ("Sure thing! . . . Certainly! . . .  Of course!") had me fooled for a moment. I suppose I was like Theodore Twombly, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, in the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her, who falls in love with Samantha, his computer's operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, only to feel cheated when he later realizes that thousands of lonely men like him are also infatuated by their own Samantha. The only difference between what was happening to Theodore and me is that is that operating systems will not go away as gracefully as Samantha does. They are here to stay. Happy ending or not?

Two Sides to Everything

The answer to that question depends on your perspective. Every technology offers huge benefits and equally big risks. A car gets you to places faster, but crazy drivers are out there to threaten your life and property. X-rays give our doctors a clear look at our internal maladies, but too much exposure to radiation may leave us with cancer. We now have every bit of essential information about ourselves on a convenient handheld phone, but that device is so easy to lose or be stolen. 

I recently designed a course, Using AI as Your Writing Assistant, with AI's help through each step of the writing process: planning drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. In seconds, it gave me content that would have taken me much more time to create independently. Yet much of it was excessive or irrelevant, and some of it was misinformation, and only an experienced human being would know that its content was lacking in places. This experience made me think about people who are swearing by the perfection of AI. They fail to see that AI is not a content creator but a lightning-fast data regurgitator.

It's on You

The lesson learned is to remember that we are still accountable for what we write. We can't say, "AI made me do it." Remember who's the boss. Here are three tips to stay in charge:

1. Use specific prompts. If you want to write a fundraising letter about a trip to Cooperstown for your son's Little League team trip, don't tell AI, "Write a fundraising letter for my son's Little League team." Even "Write a fundraising letter for my son's Little League team's trip" is not enough. Start with, "Write a fundraising letter for a Little League team's trip to Cooperstown's Major League Baseball Hall of Fame." You'll see better results, but you'll still have an editing job on your hands for greater relevance.

2. Research what you get. When asking AI for hard data, seek multiple sources. Say you want to write about the economy of your region. You prompt AI to provide the local inflation, unemployment, and cost-of-living, and interest rates. Compare what it gives you to what other sources say. I recently compared what AI said was the consumer price index according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics with actual U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To AI's, credit, it provided multiple sources at the end of its data analysis. But the federal agency itself offered more context. My further research strengthened my knowledge with deeper insights into the economic indicators.

3. Save every copy. In case you're using AI at multiple points in the development of a document, saving every copy as "Draft 1," "Draft 2," and so on will ensure that you don't lose anything. AI can get heavy handed in reviewing work, decimating all you and it had created to that point. If this happens, you'll be able to revert to an earlier draft and abandon AI, or you can start a fresh dialogue with AI with your preferred draft.     

 

Taking these simple steps will ensure you, and not AI, are the master of your destiny.

On Revenge, Part 3

This final segment on revenge comes with a disclosure about my motivation for this three-part series. Someone I love, someone I have known for 25 years, since they were 7 and I was 47, someone I have done much for in their life, offended me deeply in a well-crafted, detailed, acerbic text message days before one of the biggest milestones of their life. (I use the gender-neutral pronouns they, them, and their to conceal their identity.) I was so deeply insulted by their comments that I was too stunned to respond or to talk even to my wife, daughters, or closest friends about the attack. Anyone who knows me would say my reaction was uncharacteristic. I typically do not hestitate to express my feelings, except for when my expression might ge hurtful to someone. Many thoughts swirled through my head, foremost that we humans tend to hurt most and express anger most to those we love most. I knew they loved me too. I did not respond to their message. Although they followed up with an attempt to apologize, I could see that their words were self-righteous and self-justifying, with no real sense of accountability for their comments. I teach adults how to apologize in speech and in writing, and this person I love so much failed abysmally in doing so. I expected better from a 32-year-old.

Days later, I shared the message with my wife, who can be more forgiving that I in some situations. She was outraged that this person would write such a blistering invective about me. She suggested that I stop communicating with them. But this was not an option for me. I still loved them. Their directing such venom toward me was clearly motivated by a problem they were having with someone else. On the day of that person's milestone, I wished them well. I could have said so much about their own shortcomings, but to what end? I could have said that in writing such a trenchant, negative message, they were behaving worse than the people who were offending them. But what good would that do? 

Please read my two previous posts on revenge, the one about Taha Muhammad Ali's poem "Revenge," which imagines an offense far worse than any pain I could imagine, and the one about what masters say about revenge. Both pieces confirm that the greatest manifestation of power is restraint. More than two weeks after the offense, I am still hurting. Yet I find great solace in the words of these healers. My ability to read has saved my soul—and others pain—more than once. 

On Revenge, Part 2

Following up on last week's post about Taha Muhammad Ali's poem "Revenge," I wonder whether Ali found inspiration in his poem from Marcus Aurelius, who wrote nearly two millennia earlier in Meditations, Chapter 6, Part 6:

The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the the wrongdoer.

And then, maybe Aurelius was influenced by the Bible, specifically Romans, 12:19:

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.

Or perhaps Aurelius somehow got his hands on Buddhist precepts, which view revenge as poisonous and self-destructive, worsening the problem rather than mitigating it. The key is understanding that the wrongdoer is also suffering. Khalil Gubran and Mahatma Gandhi were credited with saying, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." Even Frank Sinatra's more self-centered viewpoint, "The best revenge is massive success," is better than seeking to heap violence upon those who hurt us.

It's one thing to say revenge is a misdeed, another to practice it. What does it require? Self-control. Restraint. Love. 

   

On Revenge, Part 1

WORDS ON THE LINE presents a series on revenge in its many manifestations, starting with the poem "Revenge" by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011). I heard Ali read this poem on Friday, September 29, 2006, at the eleventh Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, then in Waterloo Village, Stanhope, New Jersey. 

After hearing that short poem live twenty years ago, and reading it many times since, I have become convinced that the word revenge, as well as most words in our lexicon, is subject to vast interpretations. The poet posits that revenge need not be an act of violence or any sort of overt retribution, for that matter. Showing mercy to the most hateful criminal can also be an expression of revenge. It evokes Joseph's forgiveness of his brothers after they sold him into slavery, or Valjean's abandoning the opportunity to dispose of his nemesis Javert in Les Miserables.

You can hear the poem in Arabic by Ali and in English by one of his translators, Peter Cole, as I heard it in that moment live here. Please listen.