Writing - Coastal Content

The real skill gap in the AI era is judgment

Let me tell you about a folder on my desktop called “Published.” It’s gloriously tidy. A curated archive of ideas that survived contact with my better instincts. A highlight reel. A source of mild professional pride. Now let me tell…

The AI content that’s technically fine and somehow depressing

There’s a particular reading experience that’s hard to describe precisely. You finish an article. You understood all of it. Nothing was wrong. And yet you feel vaguely like you’ve just eaten a meal that was nutritionally complete and completely joyless.…

AI isn’t the one ghosting clients

If you’re a writer who’s read three articles this week about AI taking your job, you’ve probably felt that low hum of dread that settles somewhere between your shoulder blades and your coffee mug. I get it. I’ve felt it…

Why I still find writing and editing interesting

I’ve been writing professionally for about twenty years. That’s long enough to have outlasted several trends, a handful of employers and at least one complete reinvention of what “content” is supposed to mean. People don’t usually ask whether I still…

How to brief AI so it actually has something to say

In the last post, we established that AI content is bad for one reason above all others, it has no original ideas, because nobody gave it any. That post was the diagnosis. This one is the prescription. It’s also slightly…

The prompt I use when I don’t know what I think yet

Most of what gets written about AI and writing is about AI doing the writing. Which makes sense. It’s the obvious use case, it’s what the demos show and it’s what makes people either excited or furious depending on their…

AI content isn’t bad because AI wrote it

When people say AI content is bad, they’re usually diagnosing the wrong patient. “It sounds robotic.” Sure, sometimes. “It’s full of errors.” Yes, that happens. “It’s soulless.” Okay, fair, but also a bit much. These are symptoms, not the disease.…

The writer I was trying to sound like (and when I stopped)

There was a period in my early thirties when every sentence I wrote had a slight lean to it. Not my lean. Someone else’s. I’d been reading Nick Hornby obsessively, the way you read someone when you’re young and think…

Writing for an internet that’s already annoyed before you’ve finished the sentence

Let me set the scene. You’ve written something. It’s good. Balanced, considered, reasonably well-punctuated. You’ve made a point without being aggressive about it. You’ve acknowledged nuance exists. You’ve even, at one stage, written a sentence that starts with “to be…