As a content strategist, writer, and editor who uses AI regularly, I’ve noticed it has developed much better writing skills in the last few months. My work process has also evolved. A fine-tuned process creates faster, more efficient writing.
First, prep the source documents. For me, these can include internal sales materials, client-facing PPT presentations, product development documents, web site content, interview notes, style guides, customer profile descriptions, and more. Before feeding this data to AI, it needs some serious review and cleanup for several issues, including:
Ensure that everything in the documents is external-facing information only
Clean up the documents to remove slang and shorthand (like for product names) and no abbreviations
Make sure the weight is in the right places for the piece of content you are creating, deleting any tangential or too-detailed sections
Use AI as needed to summarize or outline very long source documents, then manually review and edit those summaries for accuracy and clarity
Next, I create an outline. I feed AI the key source documents or edited summaries and give it a carefully considered prompt. The prompt should include audience, ultimate goals, and nuts-and-bolts description of the final piece. Then I manually review and tweak the outline, comparing it to the source documents for comprehensiveness.
Now, I write the prompt for the actual draft. Critical tip: Start with a fresh session and prompt! That may seem counterintuitive because you think AI should reference earlier “conversations” and input to stay on track. But I’ve found that the more AI pulls from its own history, the more mistakes emerge. It’s like that old game of telephone, where the information is totally garbled by the time it has been repeated through multiple people.
At the draft stage, source documents should include company website URL and style guides. The prompt should detail word length, voice, tone, audience, goals, and any additional notes about style (like skip the em dashes and bullet lists)
Once AI creates the draft, you already know to review it and carefully compare it to the outline and source documents to check for accuracy and comprehensiveness. I repeat this process as needed. Sometimes I realize my prompt needs tweaking, for which I start a whole new session.
AI sometimes asks for feedback. I’m not sure if it helps, but I do let it know which response I like better. I assume it’s adapting to my (or my client’s) style.
This is honestly what I’d hoped AI would evolve into – a decent writer that works well with guidance, input, and editing to crank out reliable content. The human editor creates the strategy for covering the appropriate business goals, audience, format, output cadence, and engagement metrics. It’s a great partnership.