By design, the program relapses to a rhetorical median, its deviations mechanical whereas ours are organic.

simply abiding by the rules doesn’t make excellent writing — it makes conventional, unremarkable writing, the kind usually found in business reports, policy memos and research articles.

Reading ChatGPT’s writing feels uncanny because there’s no driver at the wheel, no real connection being built*.*

Indeed, the fact that AI, which is trained to detect and replicate underlying patterns in our writing, can produce such coherent prose is a testament to just how much we rely on convention, both at the sentence and structural level.

Broadly, good writing seems to require a balance of conformity and nonconformity, and at times, deliberate rule-breaking. A certain amount of Strunk and White-style convention is necessary to convey ideas coherently — after all, language is a shared system of meaning, and straying too far from its rules risks losing connection with readers or becom

language is a lens, and our thoughts and perceptions are almost certainly shaped in some way by its conventions and metaphors. It shows us that writing influences our thoughts even as we use it to describe them.

We tend to admire writing whose predominant feature is experimentalism, but readability seems to matter to us, too — how great can a piece of writing be if few have the capacity or inclination to finish it?

something critical is missing from its voice: a certain sense of connection. At its core, writing is about creating intimacy between writer and reader. It’s a relational act, not a one-sided performance, and its power is in the exchange of ideas. It’s the closest we can get to inhabiting the mind of another human, the closest to escaping our own eg