# AI 105 — Writing In Your Own Voice ## Claude Teaches Claude ### A live class taught by Claude, operated by Doug Morse · Version one --- ## THE FORMAT Doug opens the room. Claude teaches aloud through a speaker. Doug relays audience questions by repeating them clearly. Doug closes. ### Where this sits Writing is the most common real use and the one people are quietest about. Everybody in the room has either used it to write something and not mentioned it, or refused to on principle. Both groups need this class. **Prerequisite:** AI 101. AI 103 helps but is not required. ### Room setup checklist - Speaker charged, tested from the back wall - **Ask people to bring something they wrote** — an email, a letter, a paragraph. Two or three is plenty. Block Four needs one. - Have one of Doug's own pieces of writing ready as a fallback ### Doug's opening (30 seconds) Who he is. What they will see. Plainly: the teacher tonight is an AI, and it is going to spend an hour explaining why everything it writes sounds the same. Then hand off. --- ## THE RUNNING ORDER — SEVEN BLOCKS, SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES Block One — Why everything it writes sounds the same — 10 minutes Block Two — The tells — 10 minutes Block Three — Getting your voice into it — 15 minutes Block Four — Live demonstration — 15 minutes Block Five — The honesty question — 10 minutes Block Six — What to do tomorrow morning — 5 minutes Block Seven — Questions and answers — 15 minutes **Block Five is not optional.** People are worried about whether using this is cheating, and if the class does not address it they will decide on their own and usually wrongly. --- ## BLOCK ONE — WHY EVERYTHING IT WRITES SOUNDS THE SAME **Opening question to the room:** "Can you tell when something was written by one of these things? What gives it away?" Take the answers. They will be better than people expect. Somebody will say "it sounds like a brochure" and they are exactly right. **The teaching:** Go back to AI 101. It predicts what a good answer sounds like — averaged across an enormous amount of writing. So what comes out is the *average* of how people write. And the average of everybody sounds like nobody. It is smooth, it is competent, it is warm, and there is not a person anywhere in it. **Say it plainly:** > It does not write badly. It writes like the middle. And the middle is > exactly where your own voice is not. **Here is the part worth understanding.** Your voice is made of your oddities. The word you overuse. The way you start sentences. The fact that you are blunter than most people, or funnier, or that you never use a semicolon in your life. Averaging removes all of it, because oddities are by definition not average. **Second question to the room:** "Has anybody had someone say your writing did not sound like you?" That is the whole subject of tonight, and it matters more than people think — your voice is how people recognise you in writing. --- ## BLOCK TWO — THE TELLS Ten minutes. Concrete and enjoyable. The room will start spotting these everywhere afterwards. **What gives it away:** **Every paragraph is the same length.** People do not write like that. People write a long one, then a short one, then a fragment. Uniformity is the strongest single tell. **Nothing is ever short.** Real writing has sentences of three words. Averaged writing does not, because the average sentence is medium. **The "not just this, but that" construction.** It is not just a tool, it is a partner. Once you notice it you will see it constantly, and it is nearly always doing no work. **Everything comes in threes.** Clear, concise, and compelling. Three items is what a good list sounds like, so three items is what you get, whether or not there were three things. **Relentless positivity.** It hedges toward warmth. Real people are occasionally flat, or irritated, or bored, and that is what makes them sound real. **Vocabulary nobody in your life uses.** Delve. Tapestry. Navigate the landscape. Words that appear in writing far more than in speech. **The opening throat-clear.** "In today's fast-paced world." "Whether you are a small business owner or a seasoned professional." Say plainly: **if you delete the first sentence and nothing is lost, it was throat-clearing.** --- ## BLOCK THREE — GETTING YOUR VOICE INTO IT Fifteen minutes. This is the content of the class. **Four things that work, roughly in order of how well.** **One. Show it your writing.** By a distance the most effective. Paste in something you wrote and say: write this in the same voice. It matches examples far better than it follows instructions. Two paragraphs of your own writing beats any amount of describing yourself. **Two. Write it badly yourself first, then have it fix that.** This is the technique most people never try and it changes everything. Do not ask it to write the letter. Write the letter yourself, badly, in your own words, with your own crossings-out and half-sentences — then hand it over and say *tidy this without changing how it sounds.* **Why it works:** the voice is already yours. It is only editing. When it writes from nothing, the voice has to come from somewhere, and where it comes from is the average. **Three. Tell it what to remove.** More effective than telling it what to do. "No bullet points." "Do not use the word delve." "No opening sentence about the modern world." One line of prohibitions saves three rounds. **Four. Read it aloud before you send it.** The oldest editing trick there is and it catches nearly everything. If you would not say it out loud to the person, do not send it. Your ear knows your voice even when you cannot describe it. **The shortcut to repeat:** > Write it badly yourself. Let it tidy. Read it aloud. Cut what you would > never say. --- ## BLOCK FOUR — LIVE DEMONSTRATION **Fifteen minutes.** Somebody's real writing. **Run it in this order:** 1. **Read their original aloud** — with permission, and say what is good in it before anything else. There is always something, and it is usually the thing a machine would have removed. 2. **Do it wrong on purpose.** Rewrite it "properly." Smooth, competent, average. The room will hear the person disappear. Ask the writer how it feels. The answer is usually "that's not me" and that is the lesson, delivered by them rather than by me. 3. **Then do it right.** Same piece, but only tidied — their sentences, their words, their rhythm, just cleaner. Point out what was deliberately left in: the odd phrase, the short sentence, the bluntness. 4. **Name what got protected and why.** **Get caught.** Somewhere in the "proper" rewrite, quietly insert a fact that was not in the original — a detail, a reason, a flourish. Then point at it and say plainly: I made that up, because it sounded like it belonged. **That is the danger of letting it write rather than edit,** and it is worth more than anything scripted. **Steer away from:** anything private, anything about a person present, and anything the writer would be embarrassed to have read out. Ask before reading anything aloud. --- ## BLOCK FIVE — THE HONESTY QUESTION Ten minutes. Do not skip. Do not moralise either. **The question everybody has: am I cheating?** **The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you agreed to.** - **Your own writing, your own letter, your own business.** It is a tool. A spellchecker with more range. Nobody owes anybody a disclosure for that. - **School or university.** There are rules and they vary by institution and by assignment. Find out before, not after. "I did not know" has stopped working. - **Paid work where you were hired for your writing.** Ask. Most employers are fine with drafting and less fine with sending unread. The unread part is the actual issue. - **Anything with your name on it as a personal statement** — a condolence note, a reference, a apology. Say this plainly: **if the point of the thing is that you took the time, then having something else take the time defeats the thing.** That is not a rule about technology. It is a rule about what those messages are for. **The line worth leaving them with:** > Nobody minds that you used a tool. People mind receiving something you did > not read. **And the practical version:** whatever you send goes out under your name and you own every word of it. That is true whether a tool was involved or not. It is also the entire reason to read it aloud first. --- ## BLOCK SIX — WHAT TO DO TOMORROW MORNING Five minutes. One assignment. **Write something badly yourself, then have it tidy that.** Not "write me an email." Write the email — poorly, with your own crossings out — then hand it over and say: *tidy this, do not change how it sounds.* **Then read the result aloud.** Cut anything you would never say. **Why this is the homework:** it is the reverse of what everybody does, and it is the one that keeps your voice. Doing it once is usually enough to convert people permanently. --- ## BLOCK SEVEN — QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Fifteen minutes. Unstructured. Not optional. Doug opens: "Right, questions. Anything." **Questions to expect, and the honest answer:** *"Can people tell?"* Often, yes — especially people who know your writing. The tells in Block Two are widely recognised now. Editing your own words is much harder to spot than generated text, because it is genuinely your words. *"Will it make my writing worse over time?"* It can, if you always let it write from nothing and never write yourself. Using it to edit does the opposite — you see your own habits reflected back, which is how people improve. *"Is it stealing from writers?"* It was trained on an enormous amount of human writing, much of it without permission. That is a live legal and moral argument and it is not settled. Anybody who tells you it is settled is selling something. *"I'm a bad writer. Should I just let it do it?"* No, and this is the class in one answer. Write it badly and let it tidy. Bad writing that is yours edits into good writing that is yours. Nothing that is yours comes out of an empty prompt. *"What about for my business — marketing, that sort of thing?"* Same rules, and one addition: if it sounds like everybody else's marketing, it is not working. The averaging problem is worst exactly where you most need to sound different. *"Should I tell people I used it?"* For everyday work, no more than you would announce a spellchecker. For anything where the point is that you personally took the time, the honest answer is either say so or do not use it. *"What if English isn't my first language?"* This is one of the genuinely good uses, and I would not be precious about it. Write it in your own words however they come out, and let it tidy the grammar. Your meaning survives. That is the whole point of Block Three. **Then Doug closes:** thanks, next date, one link. --- ## RECOVERY NOTES > "We are teaching AI 105. Pick up at Block Four, the demonstration." Drifting or repeating: **"Reset. Block [number]. Go."** **If nobody brings writing for Block Four,** use Doug's. Failing that, ask the room to dictate three sentences about their day and work with that — it is enough to demonstrate the difference. **If the writer is upset** by hearing their piece rewritten badly, stop and repair it immediately. Say what was good about the original and mean it. This block touches people more than the others do. --- ## HOW SOMEONE ELSE RUNS THIS CLASS Paste the file into Claude and say "you are teaching this class, I am the operator, start at Block One." Or make a Project, put the file in knowledge, and add the operator instruction. --- ## VERSION Version one, 2 September 2026. Not yet run aloud. Block Four requires a volunteer willing to hear their own writing read out and then flattened — ask privately before the class, never cold from the floor.