When Intelligence and Clear Writing Collide
If others need chatbots and LLMs to rewrite your articles, it's time to rethink your approach—no matter how smart you are.
A friend of mine recently sent me a Substack article about how employers are using AI to surveil their employees. (I'll keep the author's name to myself.) For a bunch of reasons, I was eager to read it. I trust her judgment, the piece's title piqued my interest, and the subjects overlapped with my book The Nine.
As it turns out, that intrigue lasted about maybe 30 seconds. It took nary a minute for the author to lose me. His first, meandering, clause-laden sentence came in at a hearty 70 words—yes, 70. Not quite this bad, but still way too freakin' long for the opening salvo.
Trusting My Instincts
I tried to read the rest of Author X's lengthy piece, but I just couldn't. In the first few paragraphs, he did all the following:
- Conflated em dashes with hyphens.
- Inserted comma splices and superfluous words.
- Relied way too much on the passive voice.
- Generally confused the hell out of me.
My gut instinct was right: Author X was both über intelligent and a truly terrible scribe. (I've profiled this criminal before.) What's more, others clearly shared that opinion. Case in point: the following reader comment on a prior post:
I find your blog extremely frustrating.
I read your book, and it was a revelation. Genuinely an essential read in the AI age. When I read your blog and occasionally decipher insights from your writing, they are usually uniquely and useful.
But dear God, can you make your writing a bit clearer? Your pieces read like a stream of consciousness. You pack sentences with too many twists and turns, and so many quirky turns of phrase that it becomes really hard to follow you.
And, finally, the pièce de résistance:
For this post, I literally had to have Claude rewrite it and then read the Claude version. Obviously suboptimal.
If I cared enough to understand Author X's point, I would have done the same thing.
I don't.
Phil Simon
What You Need to Know
Say that you're a smart cookie. You're accomplished and successful. As such, it's easy to get defensive and dismiss others' claims. Even if you accept readers' criticisms as valid, you might not care that they need to use a machine to rewrite your words just to understand them. Hell, you may routinely channel your inner Marshall McLuhan pride yourself on being intentionally opaque. No one can stop you.
Are my readers likely to truly pick up what I'm putting down?
A better option: Care about the words you put out in the world. Don't make people use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to turn your terrible prose into something more intelligible. Ask yourself, “Are my readers likely to truly pick up what I'm putting down?”
As B.F. Skinner once wrote, “The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
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