be a good cook when you use AI to edit your writing

Whenever someone talks about how they let AI improve their writing, I realize we are still taking the wrong things away from what good writing supposedly is. Not that I am the arbiter of good writing, but we can agree that at its core, good writing is a pleasure to read, connects to the reader, respects the context and chooses the correct tone for the audience. It’s also about correctly identifying when “good” writing is needed at all. I think the literacy crisis we are going through extends in this way, where people aren’t just lacking in media literacy, but lacking in the skills above. It’s easy to think that good language is always full of jargon, that being an expert on something means long, drawn out explanations, and that you should use a supposedly intelligent, professorial tone all the time. It’s only with education and reading a lot that you learn that good writing is a spectrum, and all these things depend on the author’s style, occasion and intent, and are used in the right…