AI makes writing for fun even more fun and writing for work bearable.
My philosophy on using AI for writing is that it will either make your writing a lot better without saving time or will save time and make your writing a lot worse (or at least more generic).
As of June 2025, there’s still a stigma about writing with ai, but the future is clear: the old way of writing is over. Communicating with text no longer requires humans crafting and editing every sentence. AI will do a lot of the heavy lifting, converting human ideas into text for us. Young people are embracing AI as an essential tool. There’s zero chance they use AI for everything in life except writing.
Here’s my approach.
Write a stream of consciousness.
Start by dumping all your ideas onto the page. Don’t correct grammar. Don’t ensure everything is in the proper order. Just get everything onto the page. If you have the luxury of time, leave your stream of consciousness to sit and return to it when you have something to add. When you’ve said everything you have to say move on to the next step.
Ask AI to organize your thoughts.
Try this prompt in ChatGPT 4o:
Prompt
Organize my notes into an outline. Ensure the outline flows coherently from one topic to the next.
{paste your notes here}
If everything worked properly, ChatGPT will give you a simple outline with your ideas and no others.
Ideation
Prompt
The goal of my article is {add your goal here}. What other topics should I cover that aren’t included in the outline above?
ChatGPT will spit out a list of ideas. Follow up by diving into the ideas ChatGPT suggested or any others that came to mind after seeing them.
Prompt
Give me a few more ideas related to the topic of {your topic}.
Do this as many times as necessary, then go back to your stream of consciousness document and write some more based on the new ideas that fit with your article.
Outline
Repeat the first prompt to generate a new outline. Tweak as necessary until you get to a final outline.
Watch out for how much of the outline is dedicated to each topic. AI likes to cover each topic equally. You’ll likely want to have it expand on some topics and condense others.
Within ChatGPT, I like to work in the Canvas and in a separate document (typically Google Drive) simultaneously. AI will get you 80-90% of the way to a complete outline. When it does, copy it into the document and push it over the finish line by hand.
Create a personal style guide (if you haven’t already)
In a separate document, create a personal style guide. Not how you actually write, but how you want to write (because we all wish we were better writers). It doesn’t have to be complicated. Here’s mine:
Prompt
Avoid writing in passive voice. Never use big words when small words will do. Keep sentences short. Avoid parallel sentence structure. Stay sharp, calm, rational, and curious. Pursue intellectual honesty over rhetorical flourish. Strive for clarity rather than sensationalism. Write with clarity, logic, and evidence over fluff. [some stuff]
Notice there’s more here beyond grammar. That’s because when giving AI an outline to create a draft from, it will turn a list of ideas into paragraphs and in doing so, will fill in some structural gaps.
First draft
Combine your style guide with your outline and ask AI to write your first draft.
Prompt
Write a 1,200-word article based on this outline. [PASTE YOUR STYLE GUIDE HERE] [PASTE YOUR OUTLINE HERE]
Developmental editing
Now you’ll need to do some heavy editing.
Read through the first draft and selectively ask AI to make revisions to specific paragraphs. Ask it to provide sources for specific claims, then check them. If they’re hallucinations, remove or change them.
Watch for AI repeating itself. Not literally, but making the same point over and over. Look for crossover between this and other articles you’ve written with its help to ensure it’s not repeating the same talking points more than you’d like.
You’ll likely need to do some manual writing here as well. Good writing uses examples, and it’s a big weakness of AI. The examples are either overused, hallucinations not labeled as hypothetical, or they just not there. The same is true for quotes. If this is the case, add your own where necessary.
Second Draft
At this point, I like to send the article with all your edits, warts and all, back through a new, simple prompt.
Prompt
Clean this up. [PASTE YOUR EDITED FIRST DRAFT HERE]
You could experiment with something like this for a different approach:
Prompt
Rewrite this in the style of a New York Times opinion article.
Only proceed when you have an article that, in your view, is 90% done.
Copy editing
Here’s where you’ll start editing for your personal style. The first step is to edit out all the behavior patterns particular to AI.
- Em dashes (ChatGPT loves em-dashes but real people rarely use them. I edit them out.)
- “It’s not just A. It’s B.”
- “It’s not about X. It’s about Y.”
- Overly long and complicated sentence structure.
- e.g., “Through simple yet profound prose, authentic dialogue, and deep empathy for his characters, Steinbeck created a literary voice that continues to resonate with readers seeking both great storytelling and meaningful insight into the human condition.”
- Too many headings and/or numbered headings.
- Paragraphs that are too uniform in length and structure.
See my personal custom instructions for ChatGPT to prevent these occurring in the first place.
Here it’s possible to do some heavier AI editing.
Prompt
Change all instances of passive voice to active voice
Prompt
Rewrite this article in AP style.
Final Draft
Go back through the article and make final finishing touches by hand. Edit out all words that aren’t in your normal vocabulary. Apply your own personal touches that will give the article personality.
Send the entire text through an AI Proofreader. I like Proof Reader 📝.
Maintain accountability
If you publish the article and it’s widely criticized or condemned, who gets the blame? The answer, of course, is you. But if you would have even the slightest inclination to blame any part of the criticism on AI, you’re not done. Go back and continue working until you feel like you own it, even if the product is imperfect.