Let the pen flow from you not the machines
Monday Memo: 6/22 AD2026
Welcome to the Monday Memo, where I explore the world’s enduring dynamics; grounded in first principles, philosophy, character, and statecraft, rather than passing fads.
Hi readers,
I have been fortunate to have benefited from diverse intellectual ecosystems, and met thinkers from across the political spectrum both in the US and abroad. This has allowed me to understand rival perspectives but also has provided real food for thought. Ideas that I recall sometimes years later and have an aha moment.
The AI boom and potential bust is here, and one thing I am seeing everywhere is the dislike of AI writing. Even if you cannot tell with certainty that writing if generative, there is a feeling that more writing looks off, or is otherwise not as pleasant or clear to read as say a decade ago. I get the temptation to blame large language models, but I also think those models have been trained on bad habits that existed long before the public heard of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
Writers, especially students, are trying too hard to conform to modern trends rather than learning the mechanics of writing, expanding their experiences and knowledge, and then writing what they know from the heart. There is a rat-a-tat-tat abrupt and underdeveloped tendency that AI tends to replicate. However, this is a stilted and stifled human problem.
When I was younger I had a conversation with the conservative intellectual Alan Keyes, a former Reagan ambassador, and he said something that I later realized was quite insightful, especially now. He said modern writers act like they are allergic to long sentences, however, a sentence is supposed to contain the complete thought or idea. So why not just make it as long as it needs to be?
And now I get why it is better to not arbitrarily make short, stabbing lines of prose. Complete the thing and let the reader sit with it and decide what they want to make of your writing. Concise writing means avoiding the unnecessary text, it does not mean it has to be cutoff before the point is made.
Let your pen flow.
