After years of study, Grammarly's leadership concluded that the definition of "better writing" is entirely situational. The most critical first step is not grammar, but clarifying the communication's goal—whether it's to inspire action, change an opinion, or simply inform—before writing a single word.
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In the age of AI, the new standard for value is the "GPT Test." If a person's public statements, writing, or ideas could have been generated by a large language model, they will fail to stand out. This places an immense premium on true originality, deep insight, and an authentic voice—the very things AI struggles to replicate.
Great writing is not a stroke of genius but a craft of intense iteration. Observing Y Combinator founder Paul Graham showed that he would rewrite a single sentence dozens of times to achieve clarity and impact. This process of refinement is the key to persuasive and concise communication, demystifying the path to becoming a better writer.
Humans mistakenly believe they are giving AIs goals. In reality, they are providing a 'description of a goal' (e.g., a text prompt). The AI must then infer the actual goal from this lossy, ambiguous description. Many alignment failures are not malicious disobedience but simple incompetence at this critical inference step.
Spiral's redesign was driven by the principle that "good writing is downstream of good thinking." Instead of just generating content, the tool focuses on helping users explore and clarify their own ideas through an interactive, question-based process, making the AI a partner in thought.
AI-generated text often falls back on clichés and recognizable patterns. To combat this, create a master prompt that includes a list of banned words (e.g., "innovative," "excited to") and common LLM phrases. This forces the model to generate more specific, higher-impact, and human-like copy.
When an LLM produces text with the wrong style, re-prompting is often ineffective. A superior technique is to use a tool that allows you to directly edit the model's output. This act of editing creates a perfect, in-context example for the next turn, teaching the LLM your preferred style much more effectively than descriptive instructions.
Grammarly's co-founders discovered their plagiarism detection tool was flagging users who struggled to express thoughts in writing. Instead of building a better plagiarism cop, they built a tool to make writing easier, thereby addressing the core problem that led to plagiarism in the first place.
Most AI writing tools produce generic content. Spiral was rebuilt to act as a partner. It first interviews the user to understand their thoughts and taste, helping them think more deeply before generating drafts. This collaborative process avoids "slop" and leads to more authentic writing.
The desire for perfection and control is a bottleneck in the AI era. Marketers who insist on reviewing every word of AI-generated copy will fall behind. The new critical skill is not writing perfect copy, but engineering and continuously improving the prompts that generate it at scale. It's a mindset shift from creator to system designer.
