Write Slow, Think Deep, Part 2
A Case for Manual Writing
This article is part 2 of my series, “Write Slow, Think Deep,” Read Part 1 here.
Everyone loses when writing becomes a race: attention spans shorten, ideas shrink, and everything becomes entertainment. Except the machines - they love races. They always win, and they want to take over all your writing. They’ll steal part of your soul in the process.
But slow, contemplative writing helps you internalize ideas and make them your own. That’s a lost art, as I wrote last week. You can’t avoid technology, but you can resist the ways it forms you, and I want to show you a practical way to do this. It won’t be easy.
The race is on, everywhere, including your own workplace. Consider just how widespread this epidemic has become:
The Bloggers
One influencer says, “If you’re posting 2 times a day, you should ask how to publish 3 times a day.” He offers a 7-step system for writing Substack articles five times faster (for $7). Here’s a quick summary of his summary:
First, brain dump your raw thoughts into AI. There’s “no need to think about structure, what comes first, what comes second,” or how the ideas you’ve dumped all connect together.
Are your raw thoughts incoherent? No problem, Claude solves all of this.
Inject some personality at the last step, and you’re ready to post.
Who reads all this high-speed content?
The Journalists
Nick Lichtenberg, a journalist for Fortune Magazine, used AI to generate 600 stories in nine months, twice as many articles as any of his colleagues. His process gives new meaning to the hot take: simple news stories, like one about Disney’s selection of a new CEO, take 10 minutes start-to-finish to get online.
Fortune Magazine is not large enough to compete with “publication of record” companies like the Wall Street Journal, but it must outperform (attract more traffic than) other massive content sources like Medium and Substack. Like other smaller publications, their survival depends on more writing volume, generated faster and faster. Overall, the number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite.
Is it any surprise that our understanding of news grows shallower and more polarized?
Your HR department
It’s not just bloggers and journalists racing to write faster; even your own HR department wants to help you speed up your writing. They’ve got automation for your performance reviews, which I’m convinced most people will love. I took an informal survey before writing this article and couldn’t find anyone who doesn’t hate this writing assignment.
To almost everyone’s relief, Workday, the global workforce management software company, has built in an AI tool to write your employees’ performance reviews for you. Instead of spending time trying to remember everything an employee did, the application searches through all available project information and provides an employee assessment.
“AI frees managers from the burdens of manual documentation and subjective assessment, turning them into high-value coaches,” they promise.
That’s quite a claim. Can software really turn you into a high-value coach?
A Candidate for Slow Writing
If you think all this sounds completely exhausting, I’m right there with you. I don’t think you use AI for writing because you love it; you’re just in a hurry. But occasionally, writing really does become your main job at performance review time.
What makes an employee’s performance review different from those high-speed, high-volume examples?
You write a performance review for a person - a specific person you know. It’s written from your point of view, and nobody else’s. People’s livelihoods depend on your assessment. The message impacts your relationship with the person it’s written to. It may affect their future opportunities. You sign it in ink (hopefully) at the bottom.
Years ago - long before AI tools - Workday offered writing templates for performance evaluations. You’d select the tone (positive, slightly positive, neutral, etc.), and the system offered three or four sentences to use for each review question on the form. Maybe you’d personalize it, but there was a real chance that your own performance review would include the exact words your colleagues received on their review.
The templates solved a real problem; writing performance evaluations takes a long time. It’s hard, tedious, thinking work.
When you finally present the review to your employee, all they really want to know is the amount of their raise.
Internalizing Feedback
Managing people means helping them. It’s an obvious point, if you think about it, but it took me half my career to understand it. I was usually the last manager to complete performance reviews.
When I changed jobs mid-career, I finally realized that my technical skills weren’t the most important part of my role. A dozen people I’d never known now looked to me for their performance assessment. This reversed my thinking about the task; if I treated reviews as a compliance-driven formality, I would completely abdicate this responsibility.
I decided to invest a lot more time writing and forming the reviews. My goal was not only to give the most accurate assessment possible, but also to offer every staff member my best advice and a commitment to helping direct their future success. The writing process took a week or more, as I developed my understanding of each person’s talents and explored ideas and projects they could use to develop their careers. Since I’d internalized these ideas, I was able to recall them, discuss them, and build on them throughout the year. Feedback became a regular part of our conversations.
Deciding to do this came at a cost: spending more time mentoring my staff meant sacrificing time developing my own technical skills. I’d need to rely on others more.
If Workday is any indication, AI writes most people’s performance reviews now. A friend confirmed this recently when he told me he’d completed reviews for his entire staff in one morning.
“Nobody reads them anyway,” he told me.
I suggested he give the employees the AI prompt he’d used instead of the review itself.
Take The Long Way Home
Don’t let writing become a race. AI writing tools fill a page with lots of words, really fast. They take a good desire - expressing yourself, sharing your ideas - and give you a shortcut. In doing this, you miss the real value of the writing process: internalizing the ideas.
When you write manually, ideas work their way inside you and become your beliefs and values. When you write slowly, you think deeply. People recognize this and listen to your feedback.
It might even help them win the races that matter.
To remind you of this week’s data concept, enjoy Working in a Coal Mine, by Devo from the Frictionless Data Spotify playlist.
For the full story about making data flow faster and better, check out Frictionless Data on Amazon.
Writing well, which means for impact, meaning, and to elucidate or add insight is incredibly difficult and increasingly a lost art.
The biggest reason for declining writing skills is how fast everything is moving. You are measured on ‘respnsiveness’ which is ‘speed of hitting sent’ not on the content or the accuracy of what you write (spreading mis-information and dis-information).
Another reason is litigiousness. The final reason is the advent of bulletin board chats, SMS texts, email communication, and people who don’t read classical texts of any industry or any kind anymore - they read a summary of a summary and act as if they were a SME (they are NOT).
While this is slightly off topic from the intent of this essay, it is related so I want to post here. This is one of my biggest gripes. And why I choose to write my Substack “Intangible Edge” without editing or content created by AI. I also try to read books or article pre-2023 when possible as an antidote to and a reminder of what human writing looks like, warts, rainbows, and incorrect grammar and all.
The fake feeling and aftertaste from reading AI written slop is real. It’s easy to get used to it - like eating processed food. You no longer distinguish between it and a whole food diet. You mimic it unknowingly, or intentionally because it gets more reactions, reposts, views and comments.
Garbage in garbage out has spread to so much in daily routines and lives. The worst part - we’re losing the ability to build and create original #notgarbage