An hour before a group call with my writing mentorship, I was finishing a teaching demo at a new university, a five-headed hiring panel watching from the tiny student desks.
The class had gone well. I'd just run a fluency exercise where the one rule is you can't stop talking. You can even repeat "I don't know what to say" for four straight minutes. You just can't go quiet.
One panelist turned the rule back on me.
How would you run this exercise with a resistant student, she asked. A student who just keeps saying "I don't know what to say" all semester, refusing to really do the exercise. What would you do?
I felt constrained in my blue suit, which must have shrunk since the last time I wore it. A safe answer came to mind: something-something best practices; something-something positive reinforcement. The kind of answer anyone could give.
Instead I reached for a story. Last winter, I said, I taught a remedial English camp and had a student from Daegu. He didn't want to be there, and he ran the exercise exactly as the panelist suggested: folded arms, cynical attitude, empty sentence on repeat.
But the problem corrected itself. Knee-to-knee with a peer, the resistant student had no teacher to resist. His defiance ran out of fuel. The activity was designed for maximum student engagement.
The panelists seemed satisfied by this response.
The reason it worked, I think, wasn't because I mentioned some buzzword from their methodology of choice. It's because I drew on an experience that could have come from nobody else.
Later that day, taking off my blue jacket and rolling up my sleeves, I logged on to the writing mentorship from a cafe on campus.
The same issue came up.
Together we read an essay, which was on the topic of building community. It was written by someone with lots of experience as a community facilitator. Despite the author's decade of experience, the essay read like anyone could have written it, because nothing in it could only have come from her. There were no examples, no stories, no case studies.
Many writers in our community agreed that this essay, which bore many tells of AI-generated writing, was diffuse. Like liquid without a container, sand that kept slipping through our fingers. The essay had a point, somewhere. But we couldn't find it. It was just something that emerged from the noise, like a stereogram.
I see this constantly with expert writers: they reach for the tool, smooth every edge, and end up correct, polished and useless.
AI writing is clear, organized, and maybe even persuasive. But it pulls you to the mean, sanitizing your writing until it's hygienic and homogenous. That comes as a relief, to some. (Though it's worth mentioning: if clear writing is what you want, then there are only a few tricks you need to learn, and you can learn them all here→.)
But reader's don't care about any of that. They only care about value.
If a text is clear and useless, it's useless.
If your text is organized and useless, it's useless.
If your text is persuasive and useless, it's useless.
Clarity was never the thing that made your writing worth reading. Specificity is.
The resistant student is specificity—a particular kid in a particular place and time, solving a problem that my audience cares about. The AI essay had none of that specificity, and that's exactly why the author's decade of experience got washed out.
If you've been polishing your writing toward "clarity" and wondering why it still lands flat, the specifics are usually what's missing. And that's an easy thing to fix with another set of eyes.
In the coming weeks we'll open up some spaces in the writing mentorship. For now, I'm available for 1:1 consultations→
Cheers/William
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