Let’s run a little thought experiment. Imagine we’ll lock Hemingway, E.L. James and Tom Robbins in a room and ask each of them what makes a great writer.
The first would probably mutter something about hard work and true sentences before pouring himself a drink. The second would hold up her royalty statement. The third would probably compare our question to a jellyfish wearing a monocle — and mean every word of it.
All three would be correct, and none of them would agree with the others or the writing community at large.
I love to write myself. But the first uncomfortable beauty you’ll learn after making this misguided life choice is: There are no “5 qualities to master” that would make someone a great writer, because a literary agent will value something else than an avid reader, and they’ll care about something else than one particular professional writer.
Is it research skills? Creativity? A niche cult following? Longevity of reputation? Emotion? The goalposts move depending on who’s holding the trophy.
But while there’s no one answer, there’s a whole pile of things you can actually do to become a better writer. And since you’re reading this on a blog about content marketing and AI, you won’t be surprised to hear AI can help you do quite a few without flattening your voice into algorithmic pudding.
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The Qualities and Skills To Become a Better Writer
Writing skills split neatly into two buckets. The first is the toolkit — the technical stuff you can actually drill. The second is the temperament — the fuzzier qualities that separate competent copy from the kind of written work people remember.
To be clear: You need both. An aspiring writer with pristine grammar and no taste will still produce boring content, whether they plan to write a bestseller or a blog post. A good writer with taste and no discipline will produce brilliant fragments that never see publication. Easy as that.
The Toolkit
Grammar and mechanics: Not glamorous, I know, but non-negotiable. Nothing tanks credibility faster than a possessive apostrophe in the wrong place, or a dangling modifier that makes the reader do a double-take halfway through your lede. In a short story, it takes you out of the narrative; in a blog post, it destroys trust in the brand.
And yes, the punctuation nerds will have their own holy wars. We’ve already unpacked the em dash backlash on this very blog, so I won’t relitigate it here.
The point is: Pick your style, know and understand why, so you’ll be ready to defend it.
Vocabulary: Stephen King’s advice may have been beaten to death at this point, but it’s still valid: “It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it.” At first, a deep word bank might feel useful to show off at dinner parties, but you’ll quickly notice that good writing is really about precision.
The difference between “walked,” “trudged” and “sauntered” may seem decorative at first glance. When you see them in the right context, though, you’ll see them serve different moods, postures and motives. A talented writer will reach for the exact word and resist the temptation to use pompous vocabulary solely to impress.
Well, some of us might throw in something like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” for comedic effect and throw William Zinsser to the side, but that’s different.
Editing like your next meal depends on it: The first draft is for you. Every draft after is for the reader. Kill your darlings. Cut the throat-clearing. If a sentence is doing two jobs, split it. If it’s doing half a job, delete it. Most effective writing advice eventually boils down to “fewer adverbs,” but the real skill lies in learning to delete your comfortable phrases — the ones your fingers type on autopilot.
Reading broadly, and deliberately: Read outside your genre and comfort zone. Read bad fiction to see what not to do. Read great authors twice — once for the story, once to study the seams. Read translations if you can to see how themes and descriptions changed to account for a new cultural context.
It may feel like leisure time or a distraction, but AI has made this part more important than it ever has been. If you don’t want to sound like everyone else, you need to turn into a literary critic, even in business, and read what others skip. Unique research, weird humor, strange medieval novels, the choice is yours.
Knowing your audience: This one may be tough to hear for marketers especially, but great writers don’t write for “everyone.” They write for a specific reader and, counterintuitively, that makes the work resonate with more people.
A B2B SaaS white paper and a YA first novel both fail the moment they forget who’s on the other side of the page. And yes, I already hear the marketers complaining that they have all their personas lined up. But you know the temptation of broadening messaging just a little bit as well as I do. Resist.
The Temperament
Expression: You can learn grammar from a textbook, but you can’t learn voice. In fact, that can make it so frustrating to grasp as a concept. Expression is what happens when you stop trying to sound like a successful author and start sounding like yourself on your most articulate day, when you’re the most “yourself.”
Now, the problem is, to you, that will mean something entirely different than to me, and we both have to be OK with that. I will forever chase my fever dream of bringing long-winded sentences from my mother tongue into English while throwing in a metaphor about a chocolate-addicted octopus. That’s my writing journey. You do you.
Critical thinking: A point we tend to forget about in the days when “writing” and “content” have all become about nothing but output: The writing process means you’re making your thinking, your beliefs, your culture, visible.
If you can’t explain what you’re arguing in a single sentence, there are two possibilities: You’ve already absorbed all the rules I’m explaining and know how to dance around them, or you don’t yet know what you’re about to argue. And that’s not necessarily bad, because at least that way, writing has helped you surface a problem you were previously unaware of.
Confidence, with a healthy side of humility: It takes a certain level of ego and inner calm to commit hard to the sentence on the page or screen today, and equally hard to deleting it tomorrow, be it because you don’t like the writing style anymore or because you had another great idea.
If you’re not there yet, self-doubt is part of the process, as well. But in the long run, it’s really only useful during revision, less so during the first draft.
A process you actually trust: I’ve worked with writers in any constellation you can imagine and on all sorts of projects. The only constant is that there’s no right or wrong. Some writers will outline obsessively. Others will discover the format or story arc as they go along.
The first group might call the second one names, but there’s no universally correct method. There will be a correct method for you, though, and you won’t find it without a few ugly attempts and some abandoned notebooks.
A willingness to go somewhere weird: When you read or watch writer interviews, you’ll often hear them say, “It seemed so obvious. I wanted to do it before anyone else thought about it.” And that would make sense for generic fluff anyone could come up with after an 8-hour shift. Except these are often the folks who wrote a story that makes you question whether they even belong to our species.
The bestsellers, the cult classics, the essays people forward to each other for years — they tend to come from writers who noticed something weird most of us walked past and who then refused to explain it away. (That’s because they’ve already worked on their confidence before, you see …)
How AI Can Help You Become a Better Writer
Sorry, I tricked you. AI won’t make you a great writer. It can, however, make you a noticeably better one. That is, if you treat it as a training partner rather than a ghostwriter-in-waiting.
Here are a few use cases that actually help you sharpen your skills.
Run a Grammar Audit on Your Writing
It sounds mundane, and it’s not 100% foolproof, but let’s be honest, neither was your teacher (Sorry, Mr. Smith). Drop five of your recent pieces into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to flag patterns:
- Overused phrases.
- Sentence shapes you lean on.
- Comma habits you didn’t know you had.
It’s the writing equivalent of watching tape of yourself — uncomfortable and useful in equal measure. Just be prepared that feedback won’t help in the same way across styles, genres and languages.
Get a Tailored Upskill Plan
Once you know your blind spots, you can ask your model of choice to build a 30-day plan around them, possibly even paired with certifications or books targeting your gaps.
By focusing on short daily exercises or specific courses, you can build skills in micro-coses, which is way less intimidating and more manageable than a dramatic overhaul.
Expand Your Vocabulary — With Constraints
Left to their own devices, LLMs will happily suggest “tapestry,” “gold standard” and “navigate the landscape” until the sun burns out. You can work around that with manual edits and your trusted thesaurus, or you can give your prompt teeth:
“Suggest ten alternatives to ‘explore’ that a 19th-century naturalist might actually have used. No abstract nouns. No business clichés.”
The more constraints, the less slop.
Pressure-Test Your Audience Targeting
One of my favorites, because we writers often get caught up in our own imaginary worlds and lose sight of the original project scope. It’s great to stumble upon unusual metaphors, but less so to keep your target audience locked in.
Paste a piece in and ask the model to summarize who it thinks is supposed to read this and what they’ll take away from it. If the answer surprises you, chances are your copy is off-target. If it bores you, your copy might be bland.
Run Creative Exercises
Anyone can dump all project details into a chat window and ask an LLM to just “draft something based on this.” Why not have a little fun and surprise yourself and your readers (assuming they’re up for it)?
Ask the model to rewrite your last paragraph in the voice of a noir detective, a medieval monk and a bored philosophy grad student.
Granted, most output will be useless. It won’t even be entertaining. But every once in a while, you’ll come across one version that will reveal a rhythm or a phrase you didn’t know was possible.
Best Practices for Using AI To Improve Your Writing
A few rules, so the training wheels don’t calcify into a wheelchair.
Keep the human firmly in the loop: AI can scaffold, suggest and correct. It cannot decide what you actually think. Every piece I ship has one non-negotiable step: a final read-through where I ask myself whether I actually agree with what’s on the page. Sometimes I don’t, or it doesn’t sound like me or the client. That’s usually when the real writing starts.
Watch for bias, especially from chat models: I’ve seen cultural assumptions carry over into output in other languages. I’ve seen false claims about real people. I’ve seen wrongly quoted legal paragraphs and invented book titles. Had I copy-pasted all those into published pieces without checking, it would’ve been my byline and my legal problem.
These tools are trained on the whole messy internet, from a weird claim someone made on Reddit to actual legal documents and Wikipedia articles. That means they’ve absorbed the internet’s worst habits alongside its best. Fact-check anything load-bearing. Twice, if the stakes are high.
Don’t outsource the synapses: Your brain is a use-it-or-lose-it engine, just like any muscle in your body. If you let AI draft every email, brainstorm every angle and polish every sentence, you’ll wake up six months from now to discover you can no longer do any of those things yourself.
Not to mention, there’s tremendous joy in learning more and coming up with weird ideas, even when they lead nowhere. There’s certainly an argument to be made from an organization’s perspective about saving resources through AI, but no matter your position, you as a human being need to protect your own well-being, and today, that also means regularly reminding yourself of the way your brain works, mundane as that may sound.
AI will always be there. Your writer muscle isn’t nearly as patient, least of all if you’re using it professionally.
Become a More Powerful Writer (With a Little AI Help)
The written word is one of the most human things we do, and I for one would argue it should stay that way.
However, keeping writing human doesn’t mean pretending the tools don’t exist, even though that option will always exist. But first and foremost, it means using LLMs the way a studio musician uses a click track — something that keeps you honest, not something that does the playing for you.
Start with one AI-assisted routine and see how it works, how it makes you feel. Audit your results, build a vocabulary drill with proper constraints and test your audience targeting, if we’re talking about marketing projects. See what changes. Add another workflow once the first one feels boring. Always make sure you keep your voice, your opinions and your weird angles firmly on your side of the desk.
It may seem weird to protect and downright celebrate them, but in this day and age, they’re the only thing making you truly you. AI can sharpen your output, but the core building blocks of the broad web of activities we call writing still has to come from you.
