Write the Rough Draft Before You Ask the AI
If you want an AI assistant to make your writing better instead of blander, write your own rough version first and let the AI react to it, not the other way around.
I learned this on a narration script. I make short videos in my spare time after a day job in fiber optics, and I read the narration with a clone of my own voice. A few weeks ago I asked Claude to write the whole script for a two-minute explainer. The result was clean, correct and completely forgettable, and when I played it back in my cloned voice it sounded like a stranger who happened to share my vocal cords.
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So I deleted it and tried the reverse. This is the routine I use now:
- I write the script badly, in about ten minutes, in plain words, the way I would explain it to a coworker over lunch. Typos are fine.
- I paste it in and ask for exactly one thing: mark the sentences that are factually wrong or unclear, and do not rewrite anything.
- I fix those spots myself.
- Only then do I ask for a read-aloud check, which means places where I would run out of breath or trip over a word sequence.
The reason this works is simple. When the AI writes, it averages. It reaches for the phrasing that most explainers would use, and that is exactly the phrasing nobody remembers. My rough draft is full of habits no model would pick for me, like explaining signal loss by comparing it to water pressure in a long garden hose.
The mistake that taught me this happened early on. I let the assistant “just polish” one paragraph, and it quietly replaced my garden hose with something about a seamless flow of information. The grammar was better and the sentence was dead. I only noticed because the line felt wrong in my mouth during playback, so now the read-aloud pass is the final test of every script, and anything that sounds like it came from a brochure goes back to my own words.
The AI is still very useful in this setup. It catches facts I got wrong, it points out sentences that are unclear, and it never gets tired of checking the same paragraph a fourth time. It just does that work after my voice is already on the page.
Let the AI be your editor, not your first voice.
