I'm bored of reading copy on everyone's blog.
10 Steps to bla bla bla
Happy in 30 seconds or less
Generated Headline, authoritative body... ACTION ITEM
Writing doesn't feel personal anymore. Even when I read people writing their personal story, it reads like:
I grew up like sh*t.
I didn't let it stop me.
I won.
It's manufactured. It's fake. Even when it's true, it's not real.
Writing should be proactive.
It should evoke feelings and paint a picture.
It should arouse sensation.
Even technical blogging (at least for the web) should have some personality.
I love Wikipedia. But why is half of Medium written like it?
It would be great to go back to a time when everyone didn't have a masterclass in blogging and copy. I want to read walls of text, carefully drizzled with emphasis and character. I want perfect imperfection.
That kind of writing is probably great for those who just want to get to the point. Scroll to the header they need, scan first and last sentencesโ but then why write at all.
I guess it works and I'm the minority of people who wants to relate to you and what you're saying in a meaningful way.
Where are YOU in your writing?
Top comments (13)
I actually let that "don't be the taller leaf of grass" mentality influence me for starting my newsletter. Because I made the mistake of listening to consultants and "experts". Started writing the first article that might actually go live a couple of days ago. Took me a bit to shake that off.
I've found there is no hard rule for how alike or how unlike we should be around others. It's always a "read the room" thing for me. I can say for sure that it holds true that to be viral, you have to be great, or you have to be horrible. Good is boring. Average is dull. Of course we should be precise when, for instance, writing software documentation for a large company. When we are blogging, a little flair let's me know who I'm letting in my headโ maybe my heart. For example, I've been told that swearing is wrong and unprofessional and perhaps it is within the context of work emails and things that represent the company. Everyone loves my Java teacher (who is super tight) because his code of conduct is "Don't be a d*ck." You see even if everything else is bland, that one thing says, "there is more to this dude than we know." Ha! Being eloquent is over-rated. I especially love when carefully crafted flowing words are interrupted with a change in emotional frequency, and with it, language... You know what I mean?
Would you let you lose yourself in a relationship? I feel like writing is a relationship between the writer and the reader. Who am I loving if I'm hearing myself speak?
Okay, this has gotten existential for me. Lol.
I hope your article goes well.
Thanks, I hope so too :)
Yep, it's always this question of "with which voice should I write?" I've finally settle on "mine". I can try and pander to some ideal "standard" or some templatised way of writing but that just ends up getting in the way. Once I have to play hopscotch with words, the message gets tainted as well and soon enough it sounds like AI writing.
I've arrived kind of where I started. "Everybody's darling is everybody's fool." This whole vanity paint-job of predefined phrases didn't work for me. I rather stay "me" and be OK with some people not liking that.
When ChatGPT went out, cynics predicted an epidemy of boring articles made with zero efforts and personnality.
Super-cynices pointed out that was already the case because of a decade-long arms race of SEO, if you weren't on page 1 of Google you didn't exist, therefore everyone started to write for Google.
I write like this instead
dev.to/jmfayard/im-a-double-agent-...
Writing for Humans > Writing for Algorithms
The thing is, I love AI. I want to specialize in AI. But same for SEO writing. It's mostly rubbish. Fine, if you have to make a tutorial- fine. But I just think that blogging such as on Medium, Wordpress, etc. should be self-expressive. Where is the self in most of it, you can't find anyone there.
Thank you for post!
I was writing a blog post the last few days about my conference visit. And I was thinking a lot about what to write, and how to write it. And the output is Ok, but also it is sanitized, digestible, not too opinionated. I used ChatGPT to help a bit with phrasing and grammar, but I also rejected many suggestions because it was no longer my voice. But even then: Why is my blog post so different to what I will say to my colleagues and friends about the conference.
I will rethink, how I want to blog, here is still a balance to be had, between just writing your unfiltered opinions and a blog post that reads nicely, but impersonal, inconsequentialโฆ
Completely agree, so much GPT generated junk out there.
AI text is super useful for so many things but it hasn't yet mastered writing in a way that the reader's inner monologue while reading would sound like a real person talkingโ not sure if that even makes sense lol. It's hard to thumb when something seems right but isn't. It's a gaslight I guess. It's like a great singer without any X-factor. Unmoved.
Agree, I use chatgpt everyday for programming, researching etc.. It kinda replaced my duckduckgo.com search.
Now, I wouldn't want to read anything it writes for pleasure or for knowledge. More like a quick how to do this.
Well About time.
Working on something, with similar spirit at heart. Will You read it? ๐
Internet And Shadow Groups
Sarthak Sharma ใป Oct 7
I will.
Hmmm....as we progress our attention spans have gotten shorter and shorter. So it's easy to grab your attention with the template rather than something meaningful. (That's just my short version)
And that's why my articles are always personal to me and what I'm doing.