Excerpted “Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing” by Sarah L. Kaufman, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
AI may be pounding on the writer’s door. But the writer has some defenses. AI cannot do what you can do to make your work unforgettable: Surprise the reader. Write with truthfulness and humanity. Write with fresh verbs.
I’m not Pollyannaish enough to believe that journalism, literature, marketing content, and other forms of writing can easily resist the onslaught of bots. Countless news organizations and other employers of writers are relying on the word production and hallucinations of AI even though they also require human writers to fix them — the so-called AI babysitters. Here’s a grim testimonial about where that leads: “I contributed to a lot of the garbage that’s filling the internet and destroying it,” a writer told the BBC after he lost his job rewriting AI-generated articles for a company. “Nobody was even reading this stuff by the time I left because it’s just trash.”
He’s right. It’s distressing and everywhere: bad summaries, flat, uninformative explanations. Here’s a typical example. I searched “how to use perambulate in sentence” and landed on a site that offered many paragraphs of fluff before this instruction: Begin your sentence with a subject, like “He” or “She.” Follow the subject with the verb “perambulate” to indicate the action of walking or traveling.
