Most of the conversation about AI and writing is stuck on whether it can write well. Samantha Pollack thinks that’s the wrong question. The one that matters for your business is whether it can write like you, and whether you’d recognize your own voice if you saw it.
For the second episode in our series on voice, we welcome back developmental editor and writing coach Samantha Pollack. Sam runs Indie Copy Studio and works with business owners, authors, and academics who share a healthy side-eye for anything artificial, and she explains what developmental editing looks like when it’s applied to sales pages and emails instead of manuscripts. Her answer to “how do I know what I sound like?” is refreshingly unglamorous: you have to write a lot before you can hear it.
We talk about why writing to format is how the internet got so much slop long before AI showed up, and the difference between writing to get something from your reader and writing to give them something. Sam also makes the case that reading fiction, and even Hamlet, might be the most useful homework a business owner can take on.
* Why “is AI good at writing?” is the wrong question, and what to ask instead
* What a developmental editor actually does, and how that applies to a sales page
* Why you can’t find your voice before you’ve written enough to see it
* Spotting a writer’s signature quirks, and knowing when they tip over into a gimmick
* Writing as craft vs. writing to format: how LinkedIn templates and 2016-era copywriting formulas gave us slop long before AI
* Free-writing prompts that get you out of outcome mode (starting with “tell me the story of an object on your desk”)
* Writing to get vs. writing to give, and the “empathy switch” that keeps flipping mid-draft
* Why reading outside the business bubble, especially fiction, makes you a better business writer
* Why “I only use AI to edit” is riskier than it sounds if you don’t know how to edit
“There are people who will be like, ‘I don’t use AI to write, I just use it to edit.’ And that makes my little editor heart cry, because if you don’t understand how to edit writing, you’re not gonna be able to discern whether or not AI did a good job. And in your mind you’ll be like, ‘Oh, this looks fine,’ because objectively it will look fine. It will be grammatically correct, it will have some kind of varied rhythm. It’s just gonna feel flat and hollow because it isn’t basing anything on a feeling. When you read writing, it creates a feeling. And that’s why AI writing sounds like AI writing, because you don’t feel anything when you read it.” - Sam
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Anarchy on the Blank Page
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