Start Human: Prompting With Your Own Material
The best edit happens before the draft. Give the model what only you have.
Most editing problems in AI writing start with the prompt. Ask for "a blog post about remote work" and the model writes the average blog post about remote work, because that's all it has to go on. Give it your notes instead, the team of six, the March move, the Friday lunches you miss, and it writes about you.
This module is about the five to ten minutes before you hit enter. Most people skip them. They're the cheapest fix there is.
After this module you can
- Turn messy notes into a prompt that produces specific drafts
- Describe your own writing voice in a short brief any AI tool can follow
- Ban the words and habits that make drafts sound generic
- Let AI interview you so your stories and opinions end up on the page
Every lesson includes a prompt you can copy. Use it today.
- Lesson 2.1 Brain-Dump Before You Prompt Why your first five minutes should go into messy notes, not a prompt. A simple brain-dump method that gives AI real material to work with.
- Lesson 2.2 Write a Voice Brief From Your Old Work Turn a few samples of your own writing into a short voice brief that makes AI drafts sound closer to you. Includes a fill-in template.
- Lesson 2.3 Banned Words and Style Rules for Your Prompts A ready-to-paste list of words and habits to ban in your AI prompts, plus the plain words to use instead and why rules beat adjectives.
- Lesson 2.4 Use AI as an Interviewer, Not an Author Flip the usual setup: let AI ask you questions until it has your stories, numbers and opinions, then draft from your answers.