How Can AI Help Writing Professionals Who Write Their Own First Drafts?

If you believe in the power of your own writing without the help of AI, then you are not alone!

Writing helps you to think. By starting with your own idea, your own outline and your own first draft,  you can often produce your best work. While AI may promise faster results, the quality often falls short.. And the creative process isn’t quite the same.

AI advocates might argue that it’s all about your choice of prompts. It isn’t! What they fail to recognize is that professional writers often excel at drafting compared to AI. However, that doesn’t mean that AI has no role to play in the writing process.

It’s Different for Professionals

Writing is inherently a thoughtful and creative for anyone. But for writing professionals? It’s a superpower.

It’s a journey on which words and ideas seamlessly flow and intertwine at once in a process refined through a lifetime of experience and practice. While AI can generate content at lightning speed, it’s the quality that truly matters, especially in an era when anyone can harness AI. A single thoughtful, captivating, engaging piece, written in the author’s unique style, holds more value than a hundred mediocre documents.

AI may excel in speed and idea-generation. It can produce excellent outlines. It can even produce some really good writing. However,  professionals often have the superior hand in delivering better writing in less time by relying on their expertise and personal touch.

Here’s why.

The first draft is where ideas come to life and take shape... And the first draft probably isn’t what consumes the most time. The real challenge lies in refining and honing your initial draft to perfection, ensuring that your message resonates with your audience and makes the right impact.

The First Draft

When professional writers are in full flow, they can deliver a first draft swiftly. While AI can expedite the process by getting ideas down faster, it doesn’t always capture the essential concepts. Instead, it tends to fill the gaps with time-consuming fluff and irrelevant content..

If you start with a quick first draft that embodies the right ideas, it’s easy to neaten things up and get it right later. If you begin with an AI-generated draft that overlooks critical concepts, putting it right is much more challenging and time-consuming.

As a result, professionals often get better results by writing their own first draft.

Improving the Draft

The initial draft is a quick task. What follows demands  time and attention.

Refining a draft entails a meticulous process of checking, reviewing, revising and redrafting. It involves  scrutinizing each sentence to ensure that ideas are well presented, the text is engaging and comprehensible to the audience, and thoughts flow logically. Most importantly, it involves ensuring that the written words truly reflect the vision behind them.

Refining a draft is where many writing professionals can benefit most from AI. Even if writing is your superpower, you can still benefit from using an AI writing refiner, such as Draftsmith,  to generate micro-ideas and inspiration sentence-by-sentence.

Here are a few examples of how you can benefit from a writing refiner even if you prefer to do the initial draft on your own.

Impactful Writing

If you want make text lively and engaging, Draftsmith can instantly suggest simplifications and punchier alternatives to any sentence you’re written. If a suggestion improves your sentence, a simple click on « Replace Text » is all it takes. If it doesn’t (and AI does offer some bad suggestions) you can simply ignore it and move on to the next suggestion.

Reducing Word Count

One of the most important elements of refining a draft is ensuring that text fits within word limits. Mark Twain wisely quipped, “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” With Draftsmith set to reduce word count, you can quickly transform each sentence into a more concise version.

Simplifying Complex Writing

Product documentation, FAQs and other technical writing are written by experts for non-experts. So  complexity often becomes a hurdle for readers. If you’re explaining intricate concepts to an audience unfamiliar with the subject, Draftsmith can suggest alternative, easier-to-understand wording.

Writing with Empathy

When improving text for content marketing, press releases, and SEO, it's crucial to write in a way that captures the attention of a broad audience. Draftsmith is an AI. It doesn’t know your audience. It doesn’t really know anyone! However, it can suggest ideas that will help your writing connect with readers. Then all you do is approve the suggestions that make the writing easier to relate to (and click past the ones that don’t quite hit the mark).

Writing Refiners Make Good Suggestions and Bad Ones

A writing refiner like Draftsmith is ideal for professionals who prefer to do their own first draft. It offers the best of both worlds: AI efficiency without compromising your creative process.

However, it is important to understand that the tools won't do the redrafting for you. Draftsmith presents ideas for any sentence you want. But it lacks context and understanding. So it makes a lot of poor suggestions! It’s up to you to decide what’s an improvement and what should be ignored.

Using AI Tools Where They Can Help Professionals

No one knows your creative process better than you. If your first draft is a space where ideas come to life, carry on writing the first draft yourself. Contrary to sensationalized news reports, AI is not mandatory for first drafts! Nevertheless, writing your own first draft doesn’t mean you have to give up on AI. Refining your writing with assistance from AI makes things faster, more efficient, and more creative, especially at the professional level. It’s a great way to ensure that your words always present your best self.