I’ll be the first to admit that, as an editor, I was a relative dirtbag. I mean, I cared about what I was editing. I shared what little I knew about writing from writers who wanted to learn from me, but my core diagnostic tool came down to clarity. Most of my feedback over the years came down to “I think you painted yourself into a corner here. Either you aren’t sure of yourself and you’re trying to talk your way out of it, or you just got in a hurry. How does this work, instead?”

What else besides that?

• Be ruthless toward needless occurrences of “that” (thank you, Martin L. Gibson).
• Never call something a “misspelling” when it’s obviously a typo.
• Passive voice bad.
• “You’re doing fine. Clear thinkers make for good writers, so don’t overthink it and keep going.”

I think a lot of it came down to a fraught relationship to writing: Some middle school diagnostic administered by the state of Indiana declared me a mediocre fifth-grader in writing aptitude. What did I know? The test said so.

I self-selected into the remedial composition course when I got to college. A week later the prof said, “I don’t know what you’re doing in here. Did someone tell you that you had to take this course?”

“No, I’m just a bad writer.”

“Well, you’re actually a good writer. You can stay if you want. You can help the people who are struggling. My husband’s the school paper advisor and I think you should go talk to him.”

It kind of came down to “what did I know” all over again, just with a message it was nicer to hear. I did go visit her husband, and he did give me a column, and I won a few college newspaper awards for my columns. I liked it enough that I dropped out my senior year because I just wanted to go work at a newspaper.

I wouldn’t say I applied myself to writing. I was thin-skinned and fragile about feedback because the coaching I got amounted to “you’re actually good at this, just trust your instincts and write.” Much later on, dealing with new writers, I realized how much I felt my quality as a writer was externally conferred and hence vaguely magical or spiritual … a thing that was conferred upon me by some authority and that could be taken away or disproven by some other authority.

So my sense of myself as a writer wasn’t really bound up in any personal grounding in “what is good writing.” I didn’t think about it much. A friend who was editing my work said in a state of mild exasperation, “writing is something I know how to do, and I’m good at it, but you have to do it.”

I had to do it, and I was always waiting for someone to say I was no good after all.

So when I started doing more editing work, I felt like an imposter with a bag of small tricks I’d learned at the feet of a very angry regional editor at a small midwestern newspaper chain whose first guidance to me was “quit reading philosophy and read only Hemingway until I tell you to stop,” and whose next piece of feedback after that was “keep up with the Hemingway.” Or it might have been him faxing a copy of a story back to me with the word “NO” written through the second paragraph.

Anyhow, as an imposter editor who remembered very acutely what it felt like to be “good” at something I didn’t personally understand, it was important to me to encourage new writers to just pay attention, learn a few ideas about how to be clear even if you can’t Write Amazing Sentences, and otherwise just believe that if they were clear thinkers and knew what they were talking about, they’d probably be fine.

I say that with a little shame, because I have known so many stellar editors. People who had, as I once explained to someone who didn’t believe there could be a principal-level writer, “advanced degrees in this shit, dude.” People to whom good writing was science, vocation, and passion. Leading a tech writing team? Jesus Christ. I had no place. But I did love that period on a marketing team where I drove an internal contributor program, because I could just tell these bright, thoughtful people, “write about what you know. It’s interesting. I can tell you’re thinking clearly, so you’ll probably write clearly.” And I took joy in running into them in the hall and saying “oh, that blog post did a few thousand views! Top post of the quarter so far!”

The tech writers, on the other hand, tolerated me with good grace. That was a good team and a good time.

Anyhow, I suppose my last point on all this, what inspired me to start typing, is that I saw yet another post about em dashes and AI, and how this person was with immense regret no longer going to use em dashes because they’re the mark of an LLM. Reading that kind of post, of which there are many, makes me feel sad for good writers who feel pressured to drop a tool from their self expression toolkit for fear of stigma. And it makes me angry at people who go around calling out em dashes, because it combines the worst elements of phrenology and witch trials, then wraps it all in social media histrionics.

For what it’s worth, and speaking as a former dirtbag editor with little useful knowledge of what makes writing good, I will say that Wikipedia’s guide to signs of AI writing is interesting and educational. It puts names on things I’ve felt but couldn’t name (“negative parallelisms,” for one) and is much more useful for critical reading conducted with the intent of catching a bot.