Writing can be one of the most solitary, frustrating, and deeply personal endeavours. It requires discipline and confidence, especially since artificial intelligence has raised the stakes on what it means to write with a genuinely human voice. The blank page has always been daunting… but now there’s a new anxiety creeping in: if a machine can produce a competent first draft in thirty seconds, what exactly is the point of writing?
I’ve pondered about this for months, lost myself and my love of writing in the process, before I found it again. The answer, it turns out, requires rethinking what writing actually is and what it’s for. Here you’ll find the most important writing tips that have helped me rekindle with writing and escape generic strings of words in my publications.
Human Writing Has Never Mattered More
The more ubiquitous AI-generated content becomes, the more valuable distinctly human writing becomes. Consider what AI is actually doing when it writes: it is predicting, with extraordinary statistical sophistication, what words are most likely to follow one another given a particular prompt. The output is often fluent, well-structured, and almost always, once you learn to notice, somehow weightless. It does not spark emotion. It feels like a text that has been averaged across everything ever written… which is precisely what it is.
Research shows that people harbour negative feelings towards AI-generated content, decreasing trust online. Readers are developing new sensitivities and skills to recognise synthetic content, as illustrated by the growing avoidance of the em-dash following its excessive overuse by large language models (LLMs). New techniques are emerging to avoid AI tropes, the figures of speech and patterns that inevitably derive from LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude.
Google’s own systems now evaluate content for originality, expertise, and authenticity, and favours “humanised” content with genuine perspective and expertise. The algorithms are catching up to what readers have always known: voice and storytelling are just as important as substance. And voice is the one thing AI cannot generate. It can simulate voice, impressively, even eerily, but never as well as human sources. A voice comes from a specific person, with a specific history, a specific set of preoccupations, and a unique way of seeing the world. That specificity is precisely what makes writing worth reading. It is also, in a world saturated with machine-produced prose, one of the scarcest things there is.
This does not mean writers should not use AI at all. It means we should be using it strategically, carefully, and with a clear understanding of what it can and cannot do. The writers who will thrive in this environment are those who use AI as a tool while remaining, unambiguously, authors.
Here is how to do that.
5 Writing Tips for Keeping Your Voice in the Age of AI
Write before you prompt
The most important writing tip for the AI era is: write something yourself before you ask for help. Regardless of how short or elaborate it is, you must pick the flavour, or face an inevitably bland word soup. It doesn’t need to be good. It doesn’t need to be complete. It can be rough notes, a half-formed paragraph, a voice memo transcribed into text, an outline, a stream of thoughts, … What matters is that you have established the basis from your own thinking: your argument, your examples, and your instincts about what this piece is really about.
When you hand that material to an AI tool, you are giving it something to work with that is genuinely yours. The result will carry traces of your unique perspective and thinking, rather than being constructed from statistical averages. Drafting independently before taking work to an AI tool ensures that the structure, key points, ideas, and tone reflect your own writing voice. This single habit makes more difference than any other.
Protect your sentences, especially the first and last
AI is remarkably good at the middle of things. It fills in, develops, elaborates. What it almost never gets right are the sentences that matter most: the opening, which earns the reader’s attention, and the close, which is what they carry away. These sentences are also where your voice lives most visibly. They are the moments where a writer can take a risk: an unexpected image, an abrupt turn, a confession, a provocation. AI, trained to be helpful and inoffensive, tends to smooth these moments away.
A practical rule: always write your own first sentence and your own last sentence. Do not accept AI suggestions for either, even if they seem to work. The opening and closing of every piece, every section, every paragraph if you can manage it, should be yours. This is how the most distinctive, memorable writing is made: polishing and owning the edges.
Feed it your voice
Most people prompt AI with a topic and a format: “Write a 500-word introduction to an article about climate policy.” The result is unavoidably generic and unmistakably impersonal. A better approach is to feed the AI your own thinking as context. I sometimes ramble for minutes, using the microphone to brainstorm with Claude, just dropping all my thoughts in no particular order, as they come to mind. I also like to give it examples of writing I have 100% authored myself, as an example of the style I typically use.
Basically, tell you LLM what you want it to produce and ask it to match the register, rhythm, and tone of the examples you’ve provided. The output will be markedly different, closer to your voice, and less like everyone else. The difference between mediocre and effective AI-assisted writing comes down to specific training rather than generic instructions. Sharing examples of your actual voice rather than telling it to “sound natural” will make a big difference. Voice is demonstrated, not described. Give the AI something to imitate, and it will do so with surprising fidelity.
Put your experience back in
Another tell-tale sign of AI-generated content is the absence of specific details. AI writes in generalities because it has no experience. It has never been confused, or moved, or changed its mind, or spent three months in a foreign country doing work that overturned everything it thought it knew. You have, and that specificity is your most valuable editorial asset. To improve any AI-assisted draft, ask yourself: where is my experience in this? Where is the specific example only I could give, the observation only I could make, the position only I would take? Wove those personal, unique stories into the argument, so that the general claim becomes personal and real.
This is also, not coincidentally, what Google’s systems and your readers are both looking for. Content that shows genuine expertise and firsthand experience consistently outperforms generic AI output in search visibility and reader trust. The particular is not just more interesting, it is more credible, memorable, and worth reading.
Revise as a writer
There is a crucial difference between editing (fixing what’s wrong) and revising (rethinking what’s there). When working with AI-assisted drafts, the temptation is to accept the structure, tweak a few sentences, and add a few personal touches. This produces writing that feels right but does not land. To create writing that is compelling and striking, you must revise it as if it was a raw material. Move sections. Cut the introduction and start where the draft gets interesting. Rewrite the transitions in your own words. Find the three sentences that actually carry the argument and build outward from those. Ask yourself what the piece is really about. LLMs are good at creating scaffolding and providing feedback. Your job is still to build the building, and to write what needs to be written.
The Harder Questions about Writing in the Age of AI
These writing tips address technique, but the deeper challenge of writing in the AI era is about passion. Keeping your voice alive in AI-assisted writing requires that you actually have a voice to keep, and want to do so. That means continuing to write and read without assistance and paying attention to the world closely enough, so that you develop a point of view that is distinctly yours.
What do you care about? What sparks your curiosity? What energises you or, on the contrary, drains you? How do you like to explore and debate ideas? What is your rhythm? Which aesthetics do you resonate with? Which positions are you willing to defend? Answering those questions will help you build your writing practice, over time. This process cannot be outsourced, prompted, or generated. It is the one thing AI cannot do for you and the thing that makes writing worth it.
9 Writing Prompts to Find Your Voice
I personally have always loved journalling, since I was old enough to write. It has helped me to find my own voice and figure out what I liked to write about. Recently, I’ve explored the practice of writing prompts: being given a topic and writing about it without overthinking, just for the fun of it. I found this so helpful to identify the style and content that feels distinctively me. Here are 9 prompts you can use to find your own voice:
- The letter you never sent. Write to someone who changed your life, a teacher, an ex, a stranger on a train, and say the thing you never said out loud. Don’t explain. Just say it.
- The room that made you. Describe a place from your childhood in such precise physical detail that a stranger could walk into it. What did it smell like? What was the light doing? Don’t tell us what it meant to you. Let the details do that.
- Your most embarrassing opinion. Write about something you genuinely believe that you’re afraid to say in public. Defend it seriously. Notice what happens to your voice when you stop performing for others.
- The version of events no one believed. Write about something that happened to you exactly as you experienced it, not as you later explained it, or not as others remember it. Yours, only.
- What you know that nobody taught you. Write about a skill, an instinct, or a piece of knowledge you developed entirely on your own. How did you learn it? What does it feel like to know it?
- The thing you’ve changed your mind about. Pick a belief you held for years and abandoned. Trace the evolution, the moment, the crack, and what fell through.
- Translate your obsession. Pick something you know more about than almost anyone, a niche interest, a professional specialism, a private fixation, and explain it to someone who has never heard of it. Write it the way you’d explain it at a dinner table.
- The sentence that lives in your head. Write down a phrase, image, or idea that keeps returning to you, something you’ve thought about for years without ever quite resolving. Let it move on the page.
- What you notice that others don’t. Describe an ordinary scene such as a commute, a supermarket, or a family dinner, but only through the details that you specifically would notice.
Working on Your Voice? Try Writing Coaching.
If you find yourself producing good writing but it doesn’t sound like you, or if you’re using AI tools and notice that your drafts feel flattened, generic, or difficult to revise into something you’re proud of, writing coaching can help. I work with academics, professional communicators, and creative writers who want to write with more clarity and confidence. Together, we identify what is getting in the way of your strongest writing, whether that’s structure, voice, habit, or the particular pressures of your context, and build toward a practice that produces work you’re genuinely satisfied with.
As a writing coach, I help developing the instincts, the habits, and the critical ear that let you use every tool at your disposal, including AI, without losing what makes your writing worth reading. If that sounds like what you’re looking for, I’d love to talk. All engagements begin with a free discovery conversation, and there’s no obligation beyond that first call.
Let's dive in together!
I would love to accompany you on your writing journey. Together, we’ll define your goals and find the words to express them with clarity and confidence.
My approach builds on a decade of writing, researching, and publishing across academia, policy, and the media, working alongside ambitious individuals who have something important to say and want to say it well.
FAQ: Writing Tips and AI
Should I use AI for my writing?
There’s no single right answer. It depends on your context, your goals, and your relationship with your own writing practice. AI can be a genuinely useful tool for generating first drafts, overcoming blank-page paralysis, getting feedback, or exploring structure. The risk is using it as a substitute for thinking rather than a support for it. The tips above are designed to help you stay on the right side of that line.
How do I stop my writing from sounding like AI?
The most reliable method is to write something yourself first, before involving AI at all. Then, when revising AI-generated text, focus on adding the specific: your experiences, your examples, your positions. Finish by rewriting the opening and closing sentences in your own voice. The generic quality of AI writing comes from its lack of the particular, so particularity should help!
Can AI detect AI writing?
AI detection tools have become significantly more sophisticated and now analyse writing at multiple levels, not just word choice but structural predictability and tonal patterns. Genuinely humanised writing that has been rethought for voice and rhythm consistently passes these checks. Writing that has simply been lightly edited usually does not.
Does using AI hurt my Google ranking?
Not inherently. Google’s systems penalise thin, generic, and unhelpful content, but not AI assistance as a category. Humanised content that adds genuine expertise and perspective performs comparably to fully human-written content. The question is not whether AI was involved, but whether the content is worth reading!
Can a writing coach help me use AI better?
Yes, though the more precise framing is that a writing coach helps you become a stronger writer, which in turn makes your AI-assisted writing better. When you have a clearer voice, more developed instincts, and a sharper sense of what your writing is trying to do, you use AI more strategically and revise the output more effectively.
How do I find my writing voice?
Voice develops through accumulation and practice. It is not something you find so much as something you build, draft by draft, by writing honestly and specifically enough that your particular way of seeing begins to come through. The fastest way to accelerate the process is to stop writing for approval and start writing for yourself. Say exactly what you mean, in the words that actually fit, and your voice will follow.
What are the most common writing mistakes?
The most common and damaging mistakes I see in my work are structural: using logical fallacies, burying the point, over-explaining what the reader already understands, starting too early and ending too late, or writing around an idea instead of committing to it. If your writing isn’t landing, look at structure before you look at sentences.
How do I overcome writer's block?
Writer’s block is almost always one of three things: a structural problem disguised as a motivational one, a fear of writing badly that is preventing you from writing at all, or a sign that you don’t yet know what you’re trying to say. The solution to the first is to go back to your outline. The solution to the second is to write badly on purpose. The solution to the third is to write your way toward the idea rather than waiting until it’s fully formed.
What is the difference between good writing and great writing?
Good writing is clear, correct, and compelling. Great writing makes you feel that no other arrangement of words would have done. It makes you think: “how could this person put into words something I could never quite express myself but have always thought?”. The difference usually lies in commitment to precision and to a voice that is unmistakably the writer’s own. Great writing always gives you the sense that a particular human being, with a particular mind, was fully present when it was put down the page.
Hi! I’m Sophie
I am a writer and explorer. In my work, I analyse the intersection of politics, technology, and democracy. Nothing makes me happier than learning and discovering the wonders of the world. I consider myself an enthusiastic feminist and self-care advocate.
