Last week, Nature reported that 90% of published biomedicine papers used some form of AI assistance. And that statistic covers manuscripts that editors thought worthy of publication, not the scores of AI-generated rejects editors discarded.
Unfortunately, if you own a computer, smartphone, or any digital device, you’re all too familiar with AI slop. Generic content, clickbait headlines, and weirdly wordy content that turns some social media posts into miniature versions of War and Peace—minus content you actually want to read.
Sure, writing is onerous and time-consuming, compared to typing three sentences into Claude and pasting the result.
However, many writers turn to AI because they fear writing. For virtually all writers, despite years of high school and college writing courses, writing remains a black box. Experts call a system a black box when we know the inputs (writing) and outputs (our readers’ reactions) but lack knowledge of what takes place inside the system. Most writers lack any sense of how writing works. In addition, many of us have ample and unfortunate experience in completing what we imagined was a strong assignment, article, or manuscript, only to have some authority tear our sentences to shreds.
1. Writing is not a black box
Contrary to popular belief, writing anxiety barely affects the quality of writing. However, if you feel writing is a game where you know few of the rules, AI comes across as a good bet in what otherwise seems like a crapshoot.
Ironically, researchers in psycholinguistics decades ago identified useful insights into how writing works, which few writing teachers include in their courses. Nevertheless, from that research, we can draw guidelines that make writing easier, faster, and understandable.
2. Use titles and subheadings to powerfully prime readers’ impressions of content.
In fact, subheadings shape our understanding of content so strongly that readers recall content following subheadings as consistent with them—even when it is inconsistent. At the same time, these subheadings enable writers to create the central points of any document quickly and relatively painlessly. This step also eliminates some of the terror of the blank page that afflicts so many writers. Furthermore, these subheadings enable writers to identify the through-line in their thinking, and they can experience their documents from their readers’ perspective.
3. Place important information at beginnings and endings.
We recall information differently, depending on where we encounter it. Readers typically show stronger recall of content in the beginnings and endings of lists, sentences, and paragraphs. At the same time, readers typically spend more time reading the first few sentences in paragraphs than they do the rest of the content, anticipating those early sentences will provide a framework for understanding the content that follows them. On the other hand, if you want readers to forget content you must disclose, drop it into a dead zone: the middles of sentences in the middles of paragraphs.
4. Tie sentences together with sequences and transitions.
Use these positions at the beginnings and endings of sentences to tie them together. Sentences in English rely on sentence structure, rather than content, to determine their beginnings and endings. The result: Sentences that resemble islands of meaning, separated by gaps that rely on readers to determine the connections between them. Unsurprisingly, these gaps between sentences decrease reading speeds as writers must infer connections.
However, writers can easily connect sentences in two ways. 1) They can use transitions at the beginning of one sentence to signal whether the sentence continues, causes, revises, or illustrates the content from the preceding sentence. 2) Writers can connect content from the end of one sentence to the beginning of the next by using common wording or references to that content.
These principles enable writers to control readers’ reactions to their writing by anticipating how our reading brains respond to words, sentences, paragraphs, and documents.