Recruit a robot as your editor! It’ll pizzazz your prose and punt the drab into traffic.

When’s the last time you read something that stopped you mid-scroll? Not because it was controversial or cringe, but because it was remarkable—the kind of thing you immediately send to three friends with the message: “Read this. Trust me.”

It’s been a minute, right?

Now, when’s the last time you read something painfully forgettable? Something so bland, so monotone, so aggressively beige that you felt your IQ drop just for finishing it? Probably today. Possibly five minutes ago. (Hopefully not this piece.)

Why do some pieces sparkle while others wilt on the page like week-old produce? I have a theory, and it’s not mystical. No one smuggled narcotics into the prose. It’s not “je ne sais quoi.” Nah, it’s far simpler.

It’s the writing.

It’s proper words in proper places; it’s rhythm, diction, syntax, and cadence. I’ll confess something: my prose used to be beiger than beige—duller than a once-white T-shirt accidentally laundered with dark denim. And I was bored writing it! It was tedious and grating. But then I read a book that changed everything: The Elements of Legal Style by Bryan A. Garner.

Now, you may be thinking, no way was that book interesting. A style manual? Save me from that monotony. But this is exactly my point: take an arid topic like legal style—grammar, usage, and how to properly cite a statute—but deliver it perfectly crafted, and suddenly you have a page-turner as spellbinding as The Da Vinci Code. That's what Garner did. Every sentence was so meticulously built, every word so intentionally placed, that I wolfed it down. And it hit me: anything can be interesting, so long as it’s conveyed in style.

Enter AI, stage left.

No, AI won’t turn you into Stephen King or N.K. Jemisin, but it will make you sharper, tighter, cleaner, and infinitely more intentional. Below are the five ways I use AI for editing—not to replace my voice, but to refine it. To move my writing from Monet to van Eyck: still artistic, but with the blur replaced by clarity.

Ask AI to Apply a Style Manual

Prompt: Edit this using Strunk & White’s Elements of Style. Tell me which principles you applied. Eliminate passive voice and omit needless words.

The manual you choose matters less than the discipline itself. Strunk & White, Garner, Butterick, The Bluebook—they all excel at tidying the linguistic clutter we dub prose. But AI needs guardrails like tomato vines need a cage. Ask it to follow a style manual and suddenly it’s not guessing what “write gooder” looks like—it’s following rules. That’s the prompt equivalent of the oft-dreaded, dreadfully vague partner feedback: Fix, please.

You hate chasing an ill-defined target because you don’t want your output to miss the mark. AI’s the same. Clearer guardrails equal better output.

Try variations like:

• “Flag every instance of of and propose tighter replacements.”
• “Find five dull verbs and suggest livelier alternatives.”
• “Eliminate adverbs.”
• “Shave 25% off this paragraph without diluting the meaning.”

The point isn’t to let AI rewrite your voice. The point is to let it interrogate your bad habits so you can break them.

Nail Your Tone (Without Spending Eons Overthinking Every Word)

Prompt: “I need to email [Name] about [Topic]. For context: [Relationship]. My goal: [Outcome]. Tone: [friendly / polished / witty / authoritative / neutral-professional].”

For me, these AI tone “Mad Libs” are a daily ritual—one of the easiest ways to learn how to use AI for editing in everyday communication. Who has 45 minutes to agonize over word choice when AI can draft the right tone in seconds? Not me. And I’m certainly not gunning for Harper Lee–level perfection. Now, is AI’s output always pitch-perfect? No. But my edits—i.e., my manual labor—are usually minimal.

Tone is one of those things we all imagine we’ve nailed—until we reread what we sent. Yet AI is shockingly good at generating tone on command, especially in professional contexts where the margin for error feels microscopic and the stakes feel oversized.

Use it for:

• Emails
• Memos
• Meeting summaries
• Board updates
• Pitch scripts
• Slack posts that need diplomacy
• LinkedIn posts you want to sound clever yet effortless

And ask for multiple tone variations. Give yourself a buffet. You’ll be shocked how quickly you can sense the right one.

For fun, I often ask ChatGPT to give me these tonal variations:

• Ghost pepper
• Mel Robbins
• Milquetoast
• BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)

Microscope Your Prose

Most writing problems aren’t mistakes—they’re blind spots. You don’t see what’s muddy because you wrote it and it’s your baby. You know what you meant, so your brain fills the gaps.

AI doesn’t. That’s its superpower.

Prompt: “Dissect this paragraph. What’s the logical through-line? What’s unclear? Which sentences are extraneous? Where do I lose you?”

Fresh eyes make fresh prose. Writing is easy; editing is the crucible. It smelts drivel into art. Any chump with a keyboard can spew inane blather and call it writing. But the editing, the refinement—that’s what magics your rambling into something worth reading. Because that’s the point of writing, isn’t it? To write something that someone else wants to consume. Not has to. Wants to.

Most readers won’t work to understand your meaning, nor should they have to. It’s your job to make it irresistible—to walk them down the primrose path, yes, but make the stroll a delight. Clarity doesn’t write itself.

Ask AI:

• “On a scale of silk to sandpaper, how smooth are my transitions?”
• “Am I burying my point?”
• “Which sentence is the strongest? Which is the weakest?”
• “Where is the energy sagging?”

Ask AI to Be Your Cadence Coach

The varied tempos of a symphony—allegro, adagio, scherzo, andante—aren’t flights of fancy. Repetition is boring. It’s prosaic. To pique our interest and hold it, we must experience variety, whether that be sentence structure or length, word choice, or paragraph construction. Each is a lever you can pull to snag—and keep—your reader’s attention.

Great writing has tempo. It’s studded with peaks and valleys. But when my brain’s fried from a day’s worth of meetings and drudgery and I’m drained of all vigor, my prose is neither sticky nor sparkly. It is as varied as the salt flats.

Enter large language models (LLMs)—your built-in AI writing and editing assistant for when your brain forgets how to brain.

The beautiful thing about LLMs is that they aren't just garbage in, garbage out. Instead, they're garbage in + clear instructions, glory out. All too often, I dump steaming hot trash into ChatGPT, give it some direction, and it exponentially improves my dithering. And sure, ChatGPT won’t maketh a Shakespeare of you, but it will sharpen your writing and make it actually interesting. And that’s a helluva start for two minutes of your time.

Prompt: “Rewrite this paragraph with varied sentence lengths and structures. Target an average of 20 words per sentence. Maximize rhythm.”

This transforms your writing instantly. Cadence is magic—it’s the difference between monotone and musical. And when your cognitive resources are depleted, AI can nudge your prose back to life.

Ask it for:

• A version that’s staccato
• A lyrical version
• A minimalist version
• A maximalist version

Then pick the one that sounds like you on your best day. Or weave a tapestry from them all.

Teach AI Your Archive (So It Edits You, Not Just Your Draft)

This is the tastiest secret sauce in AI for editing—and the most overlooked. People feed AI a single draft and expect miracles. But if you feed it multiple samples of your writing—emails, posts, memos, essays—and ask it to identify:

• Your signature moves
• Your typical sentence structures
• Your overused words
• Your rhetorical tells
• Your tonal defaults

But don't feed it the meh stuff. Omit the pedantic; leverage the erudite. Show it your prose on your best day, the day you felt like all that and a bag of potato chips. When AI mirrors back what makes your prose sing, you suddenly know what you’re aiming for. You've plotted your North Star.

You’re not asking it to ghostwrite. You’re asking it to apply your voice—assiduously, even when you don’t—to everything you write, so you sound more like you.

Then you can say: Apply this blueprint going forward. Sharpen, don’t smooth.

The Close

You don’t need AI to be a great writer. But you should use it if you value your time, your clarity, your craft, and your ability to cut through the beige noise of the internet.

Good writing is not optional anymore—not for leaders, not for professionals, and definitely not for anyone who wants to be heard above the algorithmic din.

Prompt: “Build me a style blueprint so that you can apply my signature style to future pieces.”

Sharpen your legal communications—learn about our solutions that leverage advanced AI and language technology.