AI: Writing and Drafting as a Skill — In Defense of the First Draft

Something I gleaned from Doug Wilson’s Wordsmithy is that the generation of new tools and the death of old workflows should not be the cause of an excess of sorrow.

The New Tool

Many lament the loss of beautiful handwriting and yearn for the days when one would write a substantive letter in one go. But, the skill of nailing your first draft in a letter has been replaced with the twin skills of drafting and editing. This is not necessarily bad. Different tools call for different workflows, and AI as a writing tool means the multiplication of this effect. Drafting is now lightning quick. You can draft a blog post or chapter in mere seconds. Chances are the draft will be quite bad. Hence the editing.

There is a new writing skill by which drafts are made quickly and iterated on quickly. In this approach, that editing step becomes even more important.

Just as people mourn the days of hand-written letters in elegant cursive, many will yearn for the days of the word processor. They will refuse to use the new tools because they like their word processor workflow. Microsoft Word will maintain the same spot in some hearts as grandmother’s elegant calligraphy.

And I’m certainly not against reliable workflows or nostalgic memories.

But the new skill is here. It’s already becoming ossified in the programming world, but it’s just getting started in the writing world. We won’t fully know what this skill is until there are people that have been born and raised in the new world, just as we now have writers that have never written anything by hand but were born and raised on the keyboard. Blogging was hard to predict at the dawn of the typewriter. There will be a new generation of writers that have always written with AI.

The Old Tool Made New

At the same time, we see the return of a very old skill: dictation. It is now possible to write large quantities of content with great accuracy via dictation. Right now, the technology you need for this is Wispr Flow. The technology is so good that it’s sure to become pervasive.

Dictation and speech-writers have always been around. But now everybody can afford them.