For over a decade, I was English professor at one of South Korea's top research universities. As director of the writing program, I worked with scientists, engineers, and researchers—experts at the top of their fields who needed to communicate their ideas clearly.
My most important function was translator—not between languages (mine was the only English-medium university in East Asia), but between the minds of the expert and their reader. A client would hand me a draft that contained information that would move markets, if only anyone could make any sense of it.
My job was to figure out why.
Then came AI.
When ChatGPT launched, I assumed the writing center would empty out. Instead, more people started showing up with texts that appeared perfect—no grammar mistakes, tidy paragraphs, not a comma out of place.
They were perfect, on paper. But they didn't work.
And when writing is part of the work you do, this means food taken out of your mouth. Grants were getting rejected, studies weren't published, and the pathway to tenure narrowed.
AI had solved overnight the problems we spend years teaching in school. And it didn't matter.
Experts with AI-perfect prose, and readers who didn't care.
That's when it began to dawn on me:
The problem wasn't in the writing. It was in their readers.
Or rather, in the fact that nobody cared about them.
Most of my clients learned to write in school, which conditions you to write for a specific kind of reader, one who's paid to read your work and who's interested in what you know—namely, a teacher.
All readers read when they perceive value. But for teachers, the value they perceive doesn't come from your text. It comes from their salary. So if teachers stop reading, they risk losing their job. That's why teachers read your work.
It's for teachers that most of us ever practice writing. But since teachers must keep reading and are motivated to find out what we know, we never get the opportunity to ask the questions that count:
- What does this specific reader value? Why are they reading, what do they want?
- What do they already know?
- What do they need from the text at this moment?
When you've only ever written for a captive audience, you develop a writing style that is reader agnostic and glib.
AI didn't create this problem. But it supercharged it.
When you outsource your thinking about writing to machines, you get text that passes in school but fails in the real world.
In school, teachers use your writing to find out what you know, and they're paid to wade through muddy prose and suffer fuzzy thinking in order to find it.
And if that's your theory of what writing is for, then AI must seem like a boon.
But as these clients kept showing me, this kind of writing fails real readers. Real readers don't care about what writers think. And they're certainly not being paid to keep reading to find out.
That's what I kept seeing: Experts handing me their ideas, polished and churned by AI into the homogenous tone we know today as slop. And they wondered why their text didn't work.
The answer was always the same: the writing wasn't for anyone. It communicated the way a parrot communicates: Fluent, convincing, and completely indifferent to whether anyone on the other end gets anything out of it.
And no amount of line editing or better prompting can fix that kind of text.
You fix it by rebuilding your approach around the reader—around what they value, what they already know, and what they need from you at each point in the text to keep going.
That's what I call Reader Psychology: An approach to writing that proceeds from what readers actually need from your text—what holds their attention, what motivates them to keep reading, what eases their cognitive load, and what information they need and in which order.
I developed this approach over a decade of watching this pattern play out.
And when AI made the pattern impossible to ignore, I realized the most useful thing I could do was not to keep trying to convince these experts that AI is no ally to their writing. It's to find the people who already understand that writing is thinking (and AI is not), and to help them reach real readers.
That's what I do now. Through 1:1 coaching, I help experts—authors, creators, coaches, consultants, and thought leaders—see their own writing the way a reader sees it.
I also run Writer Science, a YouTube channel and newsletter where I teach what I know and share what I'm learning about the art and science of expert writing.
If you've read this far, we should probably talk.
Get in Touch
- 🐦 If you've got a short question or message, please 𝕏eet @WriterScience and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
- 📨 If it's a longer message, please email me (will [at] writerscience [dot] com).
- 🤝 If you'd like to collaborate on your next writing project, Book a call.