👋 Hi [FIRST NAME GOES HERE],

I stumbled upon Jon Steinback's work on Marker this week.

Marker is a new writing app which helps you articulate and discover what you want to write about.

I am all to try out AI-assisted writing tools (peep my previous writing reviews about Lex), so I jumped into the waitlist promptly.

While I awaited my turn to peek into the app, I was rummaging around on their site, when one of their articles caught my eye.

Frankly? I think it articulates the best intent an AI-assisted writing tool could have.

Ryan Bowman talks about the evolution of the editing process and word processors through our time.

But the piece that stood out for me is that he writes about the intent for great editing, and what great writing tools should stand for today, particularly in this paragraph.

And it is no mystery how we lost sight of them: a culture tuned for output stops prioritising the one role whose purpose is to slow you down and ask what you actually mean. The value an editor brings is hard to measure, and so a world bent on efficiency forgets they were ever there. But we ignore them at our peril. With an editor, writing, writers can soar. Without, both can plummet.

I believe that's where most AI-assisted writing and editing tools are falling short of the jobs-to-be-done:

It should not impose its own imitation of the writer, but cut down the original writer's composition to reveal the true intent of their thinking.

I am yet to get my hands on the Marker app, so I will keep you folks posted if it lives up to its promise.

But what I am doing these days to keep my writing crisp is to follow one simple idea and strip away everything in the writing that detracts from it.

Yes, preparing an outline helps, but when you are writing for LinkedIn, you might just hammer a post out by transcribing your own voice.

Once you have a semblance of a draft ready, I run it past a series of writing checks on a Claude custom skill, to see if I am packing too many ideas in my post.

If it does, I push out all the other angles to my writing backlog, until there is only one strong angle left. I iterate on it until I have covered everything I wanted to say, and I have cut it down to a crisp.

Curious to see the skill in action on your own writing? I am happy to send it over, with the only caveat that you respond with your feedback on that effort.

Let me know by hitting ‘Reply’ on this email, or send a note to [email protected].

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Cheers,

Renga from LetterStack

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