Writing doesn’t come easily to many professionals. And the sooner you determine if that statement applies to you, the better.
If you aspire to be a Visible Expert®, you will enjoy greater success if you are known as both a writer and a speaker. Public speaking often gets easier with time and experience. But writing—at least good, thoughtful writing—can feel like a painful chore even after decades of experience.
Luckily, all that’s changed. Thanks to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Copilot, your writer self gets to retire to Florida. (Which pool floatie will it choose today?) All those ideas that stubbornly won’t shake loose from your coconut, all those words that spill onto the page like old, crystallized honey, all that editing and rewriting, all that frustration… has vanished.
The word robots are here to save the day.
Everything in the previous two paragraphs, of course, is nonsense. The word robots are ingenious machines that love to do your bidding. And they are amazing at a lot of tasks. But ask them to draft an original blog post that doesn’t read like a cardboard box, and you’ll likely feel that old frustration on the rise again.
No bot is you. You can feed your chatbots examples of your work for style and a detailed outline for ideas and structure. But in the end, the output is, well, awkward. You’ll see all the AI tells: bullet points, bolded terms, cliches, mixed metaphors and those weird, clumsy phrases that would never have come from your fingertips. The problem is them, not you.
Bots don’t have your years of experience. They don’t know what will and won’t play with your audience. And they aren’t creative thinkers. Only you have the bottle of special sauce.
There’s nothing like engaging with the material as it forms from your head. Like clay figures, the ideas and imagery appear a little disturbing and misshapen at first. But with some tweaking here, some carving there, some burnishing here, the piece comes to life. Out of nothing appears a well-articulated idea or well-defended position!
Now, what if all this writing craft isn’t for you? What if you don’t have the time to play Geppetto once or twice a month?
Assuming you are an expert with your own ideas and a point of view, there is another approach. One that has a long history of success. You can hire a ghostwriter.
I know what you are thinking. How is a ghostwriter different from ChatGPT? They don’t have your bottle of special sauce, either.
The answer has three parts:
- They are human like you.
- They (presumably) can write interesting copy.
- They can ask probing questions along the way.
You can spend a half hour briefing your writer—what you want to say, what facts you want to use to support it—and let them go off and do the hard work. Then the collaboration begins to produce a piece that presents your point of view and sounds reasonably like your voice.
A freelance professional writer isn’t cheap. Expect to pay $80 to $150 per hour for a good one. Many firms that value thought leadership will cover the cost. The benefits of Visible Expertise make it all worthwhile.
To many AI evangelists, what I’ve written will be dismissed with an eye-roll emoji. “What a Luddite!” And if I didn’t believe AI tools can play a pivotal role in writing, they would be right. In fact, AI is an exceptional tool to help writers be more productive. AI can help you come up with ideas, support them with evidence and check your work. It can be used to test your argument and strengthen your case. It can even draft short, specific passages of text—just be prepared to revise them.*
In the end, AI is a tool. A powerful tool. Like your computer. And your brain. Only don’t forget to keep using that last one.
*I’m speaking specifically here about thought leadership content like blog posts and articles. AI can produce insightful long-format pieces, such as reports and analyses, when presenting an individual point of view and style is less important.
