Don’t try to be clever, just be yourself.

This is good advice if you are giving a speech at a wedding reception. It is also good advice if you are writing a document for a real person to read.

I have worked in and around the public sector my whole career. There is a tendency among public servants to overwrite, making even simple messages hard to fathom. “We would be grateful for your remittance at your earliest convenience,” rather than “Please pay this debt by [date].”

Lawyers have a particular reputation for this sort of writing and yet even they are beginning to see the merit in writing contracts and other documents that are in plain language that they can be understood by their clients.

I think it is a cultural thing. Public servants must believe bureaucracy to be a good thing[1] since they have chosen to work in it. And bureaucracies use long words and complicated grammar. Perhaps it goes all the way back to the days when clerks would write documents that the vast majority could not read and so they pleased themselves.

One of my fears for documents created using artificial intelligence (AI) prompts is that the results will be faster creation of bad writing rather than good writing. I say this because the AI models are created by learning from existing texts. If I ask ChatGPT or similar to draft an internal audit report, or a business plan, or a customer letter it is not going to use the best possible examples as a template. It’s going to string words together based on what is most likely, and what is most likely will be average writing. It saddens me to think that this technology would result in the highly efficient creation of poor documents. That is not progress. It is what Russell Ackoff referred to as “doing the wrong thing, righter.”

(My fear extends to presentations, too. The world is full of terrible slide decks based on bullet points and we do not need AI to create any more of them. We need presenters to understand two things: the presentation is what the presenter says and if slides are used they must not distract from what is said and that means there should be very little, if any, text on them.)

So, if you decide to use an AI service to write documents for you, I suggest you spend some time working on prompts that improve the chances of the results being good writing. You can instruct it to produce something in plain language. You can request it follows the style of some text that you include in the prompt. You can set a word limit.

And you must edit whatever is produced by the AI service. Remember: it is not clever, and it’s not yourself.

Note:

[1] Bureaucracy is a good thing, not only in the public sector. For example, organisations need to pay staff and suppliers correctly and bureaucracy makes that happen.