As a student, I used to redraft my essays a lot. It taught me that writing is about building a bridge between minds – the reader’s and the writer’s. First, I had to learn how to transfer my thoughts onto the page in an organised and coherent way. Then, to think about what the reader didn’t know and what I needed to explain.
Good academic writing, I discovered, was about helping readers follow my thinking. After all, they wouldn’t know what was inside my head unless I told them.
I learnt to signpost the connections between my ideas, explain why I thought some things deserved attention, and warn when I was about to change direction or introduce new points.
Getting thoughts onto a page is complicated. No matter how well you know the practice, building a bridge between minds is never simple. The editing profession exists because writers recognise the need for help.
From my first editing job onwards, I saw that transferring ideas from the mind to the page is challenging for everybody. As an editor, I learnt to follow the writer’s thoughts very closely and make edits to clarify their ideas.
I still work like that today (when appropriate), even on texts written with AI assistance. A writer operating an AI still needs to build a bridge between their knowledge and the reader’s. They also need to make sure the AI knows what they want to say. That’s not always easy.
Along with this, AI-assisted text has highlighted the importance of a different editorial skill. Editors have always been vocabulary enthusiasts, but that matters more than ever now. AI can have significant problems with the meanings of words.
In any language, words belong to groups of meaning. The words in a group express related ideas. They vary in rightness for a situation, strength, feeling, and fit.
Many words have more than one meaning and evolve through use. Living in the world helps human writers understand that. AI can lag behind.
AI’s wrong word choices can confuse readers and introduce contradictions into texts. Sometimes, the word used may have the correct meaning but be too obscure or communicate the wrong tone. It’s now the editor’s job to sort that out.
I’m looking forward to seeing how AI develops to tackle this vocabulary problem in the future. I believe it has improved in recent years.
Even in a world with very advanced AI, people will always need to learn how to explain what they’re thinking. I suspect that traditional writing skills will be valued for a long time yet.
Tide & Time Editorial 