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.
Quite a few years ago I attended a communications course given by Dr. Edward Tufte, he was not a fan of PowerPoint. You may find these links to some of his material on PowerPoint and communications interesting:
Cognitive Style of PowerPoint:
https://diverdi.colostate.edu/all_courses/%20oral%20presentations%20-%20communication%20and%20style/cognitive_style_of_powerpoint_tufte.pdf
PowerPoint does rocket science and better techniques for technical reports (includes an analysis of how a poorly constructed .ppt deck misinformed NASA leadership re the condition of Columbia prior to its reentry and subsequent structural failure):
https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/powerpoint-does-rocket-science-and-better-techniques-for-technical-reports/
IMHO, the quality and depth of writing in general began to take a downturn when the first DOS versions of what is now PowerPoint emerged and organizations started using slide decks in lieu of briefing papers and reports, ostensibly because of "efficiency" on the part of the writer and the reader. Email also grew to supplant memorandums and other forms of correspondence that were editorially reviewed by others prior to sending. While velocity increased, what suffered was analysis and understanding on the part of the writer or slide jockey, resulting in less comprehension by the recipient. This is expressed in the joking term "His understanding is PowerPoint deep". With the decreasing organization emphasis on the art of writing and reading comprehension also went attention spans and the ability to focus deeply. Throw into this mix web browsers and search engines which have largely replaced the use of libraries for research along with small cell phone screens which dont lend themselves to much more than a few sentences, and the is result human brains which have been transformed from routine deep thought and deep understanding capacity into only being comfortable with short & disconnected chunks of rapid fire information frequently devoid of depth. LLMs trained in this environment are going to be a lot different than they would be had they ingested pre-personal computer and internet material.