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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How To Force AI to Write More Like You (2026-05-10)
There is no such thing as writing style
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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How To Force AI to Write More Like You (2026-05-10) :: View in Browser
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The Big Plugs
New things!
1️⃣ Job to AI Skill and Plugin
Content Authenticity Statement
75% of this week’s newsletter content was originated by me, the human. You’re going to see many different writing samples from AI in the main content and in the appendix. Learn why this kind of disclosure is a good idea and might be required for anyone doing business in any capacity with the EU in the near future.
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What’s On My Mind: How to Force AI to Write More Like You
This week, let’s talk about writing with AI in more detail. I had a great time presenting at the SmarterX AI for Writers Summit, but we barely touched any of the questions submitted in my session. For simpler questions, I answer these either during my daily videos on my YouTube channel (10 minutes or less), or as Overtime Questions on the Trust Insights YouTube channel (1 minute or less).
But a few questions deserve more airtime than that, so that’s what this week’s issue will cover, the big stuff. The biggest question that people had throughout the entire summit was, “how do I get AI to write more like me?”
Part 1: There Is No Such Thing as Writing Style
We’ll begin with one of my favorite rants: there is no such thing as writing style.
Take a moment to consider for yourself how you would describe your writing style. If someone asks you to explain your writing style, what do you say? How do you describe it?
Chances are you say something circular or self-referential like “I write like me!”, Because we often don’t have the vocabulary to describe the components of writing style. Or if we do, we learned them a very long time ago and forgot them.
Writing style is an umbrella term that describes dozens of different descriptive characteristics of how we write, such as:
Vocabulary and diction (word choices)
Levels of formality
Jargon and slang
Syntax (order of words)
Sentence length
Sentence structure
Punctuation (hey em dash!)
Parallelism
Tone
Register
Mood
Irony
Sarcasm (yeah, right)
Voice
Point of view
Rhythm and cadence
Pacing
Paragraph structure
Figurative language
Metaphors and similes
Imagery
Personification
Whitespace
Spelling (or lack thereof)
Rhetoric
Cohesion
Grammar
Text formatting (e.e. cummings would like a word for those who say it doesn’t matter)
Structural elements (hello listicles)
Depending on who you read, these are still only a subset of all the different ways to describe someone’s writing. Each of these characteristics sheds light about how we write, about how we put words on paper or keyboard.
This is one of the reasons why generative AI prompts such as “write in a professional style” are so deeply flawed. What does that mean? What is the average sentence length of professional versus non-professional writing? What is the register? What is the point of view?
Go back to that consideration of your writing style that I asked you about just a few paragraphs ago. Did you cover tone in your own mental description of how you write? Did you cover pacing or paragraph structure, imagery or rhetoric?
Unless we are recovering English majors