Writing is a veil

I don’t claim to be a particularly good writer. But I’m happy when people sometimes tell me my writing reads as if I am talking.

Sometimes the voice I adopt is careful and direct, when I have to put on my serious professor-person hat and articulate sharply and precisely. Sometimes it is more lively, like we are sitting at a bar and I am swinging my arms around to get my point across.

I really like the idea that you can hear me through these words. It’s good vibes. This possibility also makes the act of writing less lonely. We have to isolate and concentrate to write. But writing at its core is a social activity, just one which is subject to variable delays.

So good writing, at least as I imagine it, allows the reader to see past the veil between text and author. We first learn how to write down the thoughts in our head. The rest is closing the gap between readers and ourselves.

Maybe you can guess I’ve been assigning and marking student assessments, and that this post is actually about AI.

I strongly, even dogmatically, encourage students to use AI. They’re going to anyway, and they’re going to need to use it in the workplace. It isn’t their fault that educators don’t yet know how to assign effective assessments for an AI world. In my view, we might as well show students how to use AI well, rather than disapprovingly watch them use it badly.

The class I teach is about career planning. It’s at the end of the student’s business degree. The assessments in this class aren’t about any particular information or knowledge handed down from the lecturer or text. They’re about how effectively the students can reflect on their own life goals and aspirations, and how they can map out a very personal path from today to their future. The whole point is to be personal. To be particular.

But too often I get stuff that reads like was written by the PR department for a large suburban timber and flooring company:

My character strengths are not just tools but pillars of my identity. They shape how I approach challenges, build relationships, and define success. By consciously integrating them into my business, I can create a brand that’s both innovative and relatable, while ensuring my leadership and curiosity drive sustainable growth.1

This is the business version of stolen valor. You have to work in corporate affairs for decades to write that vapidly.

And it is surprisingly hard to mark. It’s written well! It’s obviously AI but in a way that is hard to articulate. The grammar is good. The sentences flow. The second sentence uses the rule of three. It is eloquent and it is rubbish. It is the uncanny valley of clever. And at assessment time you get pages and pages and pages of it.

Until quite recently mediocre was a synonym for adequate. It used to take work to be mediocre. But now mediocre can be produced at zero marginal cost.

I usually tell the students who hand in this sort of writing that their assessments lack a certain concreteness, that they could be more specific, that their work is too general and bland. We were looking for more critical analysis.

On reflection this doesn’t really describe the problem usefully. So next time I should ask the robot to make it less bland? Thanks, prof.

Here’s how I want to put it now: the problem with this sort of writing is that we can’t see through it to the person behind. When we pull aside the veil we see not a person but a large model of statistical relationships in a tokenised corpus of internet writing.

I’ve written that AI makes us (forces us) to be more human. If we automate all the drudgery away we are left with nothing but our individuality. Writing needs to broadcast individuality. Even writing that was once seen as boilerplate - that we called “copy” - has to puncture the veil between text and author. The most instrumental writing will have to be informed by taste. Why read it otherwise? Why write it?

It has been interesting to see the Trump administration (for very different reasons) adopt a house communication style very different from its predecessors - a looseness that apes the president’s own speaking patterns. For better or worse, you can definitely hear a voice through the written text.

Maybe the 2000s first‑person industrial complex knew what it was doing. Here are my wounds, are you not entertained? This is probably not great advice for students though.2

But too often we’ve taught students and each other that words are something to hide behind. Dissociative writing no longer has any value. Readers want to see past the veil. Writers need to try to pierce it.

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