Several Short Sentences About Writing Book by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Writing in the Age of AI: Preserving Human Voice

Writing, especially in marketing, is fundamentally creative work. You spend hours choosing words, crafting sentences, and shaping structure. That's where the real work happens—the drilling, the drudgery that pushes us to our creative limits. Even when it's tough, even when we're stuck and can't think, that struggle is part of what makes writing rewarding. Looking back at those moments of breakthrough—that's where the fun lies, and that's what creates uniqueness.

The difference between one writer and another comes down to this: the ability to conjure words and sentences that make things visible or understandable in ways that didn't exist before. Words are powerful.

However, we now have ChatGPT and other large language models. Almost all our modern writing tools integrate AI—a helpful friend always ready to fix errors, critique our work, suggest changes, and offer improvements. We can even role-play, asking AI to adopt personas we're not or change our intended tone entirely.

Here's the problem: What if all emails start looking the same? What if all blogs sound identical? What if everything touched by AI assistance becomes uniform? I fear this monotony. There's no room left for reading between the lines.

The beauty of imperfect writing is its emotion. Imperfect writing carries the writer's state of mind, their confusion, their humanity. Words become vessels for these feelings. With AI's polished perfection, we risk losing that emotional texture. Perfect writing can feel monotonous—you can't read between the lines anymore.

So for anyone starting out—or really, for any writer today—writing still matters. Even with LLMs everywhere, the craft remains essential. The question is: how do we escape this monotony?

The answer might be simpler than we think: good old-fashioned writing wisdom still applies. Writing tips, tricks, and motivation haven't lost their relevance. Recently, I've been reading "Several Short Sentences About Writing" by Verlyn Klinkenborg, and it's reminded me why fundamental writing principles matter more than ever.

Excerpt From
Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg

The perils of long sentences:

“There’s nothing wrong with well-made, strongly constructed, purposeful long sentences.
But long sentences often tend to collapse or break down or become opaque or trip over their awkwardness.
They’re pasted together with false syntax
And rely on words like “with” and “as” to lengthen the sentence.
They’re short on verbs, weak in syntactic vigor,
Full of floating, unattached phrases, often out of position.
And worse—the end of the sentence commonly forgets its beginning,
As if the sentence were a long, weary road to the wrong place.

Writing short sentences restores clarity, the directness of subject and verb.
It forces you to discard the strong elements of long sentences,
Like relative pronouns and subordinate clauses,
And the weak ones as well:
Prepositional chains, passive constructions, and dependent phrases.

Writing short sentences will help you write strong, balanced sentences of any length.
Strong, lengthy sentences are really just strong, short sentences joined in various ways.

What is a short sentence?

To make short sentences, you need to remove every unnecessary word.
Your idea of necessary will change as your experience changes.
The fact that you’ve included a word in the sentence you’re making
Says nothing about its necessity.
See which words the sentence can live without,
No matter how inconspicuous they are.
Every word is optional until it proves to be essential,
Something you can only determine by removing words one by one
And seeing what’s lost or gained.
Listen for the sentence that’s revealed as you remove one word after another.
You’ll hear the improvement when you find it.
Try, for instance, removing the word “the.”
See when the sentence can do without it and when it can’t.

Kill the darlings

“Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed.
The rest will need to be fixed.
This will be true for a long time.
The hard part now is deciding which to kill and which to fix and how to fix them.
This will get much, much easier, but the decision making will never end.”

“It’s surprising where these incremental changes lead,
How they solidify what seems to be unstable,
How they open up directions you hadn’t glimpsed before.
You may find that the most important section of the piece—a section you haven’t written yet—emerges from the gap created when you break a long sentence in two.

It’s true that the simplest revision is deletion.
But there’s often a fine sentence lurking within a bad sentence,
A better sentence hiding under a good sentence.
Work word by word until you discover it.
Don’t try to fix an existing sentence with minimal effort,
Without reimagining it.
You can almost never fix a sentence—
Or find the better sentence within it—
By using only the words it already contains.
If they were the right words already, the sentence probably wouldn’t need fixing.
And yet writers sit staring at a flawed sentence as if it were a Rubik’s Cube,
Trying to shift the same words round and round until they find the solution.
Take note of this point: it will save you a lot of frustration.
This applies to paragraphs too.”

"Noticing" is an essential skill for a writer

“Is it possible to practice noticing?
I think so.
But I also think it requires a suspension of yearning
And a pause in the desire to be pouring something out of yourself.
Noticing is about letting yourself out into the world,
Rather than siphoning the world into you
In order to transmute it into words.

Practicing noticing will also help you learn more about patience
And the nature of your mind.
Noticing means thinking with all your senses.
It’s also an exercise in not writing.

So what is noticing?
A pinpoint of awareness,
The detail that stands out amid all the details.
It’s catching your sleeve on the thorn of the thing you notice
And paying attention as you free yourself.

It requires no gear, no special tools, no apparatus.
You practice noticing as part of your ordinary life.

What do you notice? Whatever you notice.
Behavior, thought, overheard words, light, resemblance,
Emotion, totality, particularity,

Importance of reading your words aloud.

“And no matter how hard you look, you’re almost invisible to yourself,
Camouflaged by familiarity.
One basic strategy for revision is becoming a stranger to what you’ve written.

Try reading your work aloud.
The ear is much smarter than the eye,
If only because it’s also slower
And because the eye can’t see rhythm or hear unwanted repetition.

But how should you read aloud?
There’s self-awareness even in this,
A tendency to overdramatize or become self-conscious,
To read as though the words weren’t yours,
Mechanically, without listening,
As though you were somehow hiding from their sound
Or merely fulfilling a rote obligation.

Try reading the words on the page as though they were meant to be spoken plainly
To a listener who is both you and not you—
An imaginary listener seated not too far away.
That way your attention isn’t only on the words you’re reading.
It’s on the transmission of those words.
As you read aloud, catch the rhythm of the sentences without overemphasizing it.
Read so the listener can hear the shape of the syntax.
You be the listener, not another person.
You’ll be stopping often.

“Don’t read straight through without stopping.
Read until your ear detects a problem.
Stop there.
How will you know there’s a problem?
Something will sound funny.
You’ll feel a subtle disturbance, a nameless, barely discernible tremor inside you.
You won’t say, “Aha! That pronoun has the wrong antecedent!”
        (Though soon you will.)
You’ll simply feel that something’s wrong, without knowing what.
        (This also happens when you’re reading silently, but less emphatically.)

Pay attention now:
No matter how much you know or learn about syntax, grammar, and rhetoric,
This small internal quaver, this inner disturbance,
Is the most useful evidence you’ll ever get.
Someday, you’ll be able to articulate what causes it.
But for now, what’s important is to notice it.
Noticing is always the goal.”

On the importance of checking the rhythm in writing:

“If you don’t know what I mean by rhythm,
Imagine a singer’s phrasing of the lyric in a song.
In prose, it’s subtler, the beat and the music quieter.
Try reading aloud some of everything you read, no matter what it is,
A couple of paragraphs from the newspaper or a textbook or a novel or a poem.
Especially a poem.
This is how you begin to understand rhythm and its absence.”

“Sometimes a rhythm insinuates itself.
You find yourself listening for echoes, opportunities.
Sometimes you find yourself watching the traces of words,
Phrases, memories, flitting through your mind.
Each of these can engender a sentence, offer a shape.
Be responsive to the variations that present themselves as you think.

Soon, you’ll grasp that sentences originate and take their endless variety
From within you, from your reading,
Your tactile memory for rhythms,
Your sense of the playfulness at the heart of the language,
Your perception of the world.”

Importance of revising your writing.

“So, you’ll be revising each sentence as you compose it.
Composing each sentence as you revise it.
And you’ll read and reread every sentence you make many dozens of times,
Sifting out problems as they materialize in front of you.
You’ll be looking for flaws.
But also for opportunities—and for missed opportunities:
Things you might have said, ideas you might have developed,
Connections you might have made.

Revision isn’t only the act of composition.
Revision is thinking applied to language,
An opening and reopening of discovery,
A search for the sentence that says the thing you had no idea you could say
Hidden inside the sentence you’re making.

Revision is the writer’s reading,
The habit of noticing choices,
Noticing that every sentence might be otherwise but isn’t.”

Where the Mind Leads: Following the Crosscurrents of Thought

“Give yourself over to this experiment.
Your intentions will diverge from themselves.
Your starting point may lead to places you didn’t imagine,
Places that ask you to reconsider your starting point.
You may feel yourself clinging to your original intention.
Why?
Because it came first?
Why not follow the crosscurrents of your thinking
And see where they lead?
I don’t mean follow them blindly.”

“The piece you’re writing is simply the one that happens to get written.
If you’d begun another way, made a different turn, even started in a different mood,
A different piece would have come into being.
The writer’s world is full of parallel universes.
You discover, word by word, the one you discover.
Ten minutes later—another hour of thought—and you would have found your way into a different universe.
The piece is permeable to the world around it.
It’s responsive to time itself, to the very hour of its creation.

This is an immensely freeing thing to understand.

It liberates you from the anxiety of sequence,
The fear that there’s only one way through your subject,”

Putting it all together. The key to good writing as a skill — in simple sentences.

“The better question now is the more fearful one:
“How will I know when to stop revising?”
You may not be able to tell yet whether your revisions are really improvements.

So revise toward brevity—remove words instead of adding them.
Toward directness—language that isn’t evasive or periphrastic.
Toward simplicity—in construction and word choice.
Toward clarity—a constant lookout for ambiguity.
Toward rhythm—where it’s lacking.
Toward literalness—as an antidote to obscurity.
Toward implication—the silent utterance of your sentences.
Toward variation—always.
Toward silence—leave some.
Toward the name of the world—yours to discover.
Toward presence—the quiet authority of your prose.

And when things are really working,
That’s when it’s time to break what already works,
And keep breaking it
Until you find what’s next."