Writing craft

Writing that sounds human is not a style you put on. It is a set of specific, describable habits: varying how long your sentences run, committing to a claim instead of hedging it, reaching for the concrete noun rather than the abstract one, and cutting the material that delays your point without adding to it.

Those habits are learnable, and they are the same ones that make any prose better. They happen to be the habits language models suppress, because a system trained to produce inoffensive, evenly weighted text converges on the statistical middle of everything it read. That is why generated prose feels flat even when every sentence is correct.

These articles cover each habit on its own terms — what it is, why it matters, and how to practise it — with before-and-after examples throughout.