Inside the writing partnership

I'm not convinced a form can tell me enough to write under someone else's name.

It could give me their background and examples of their writing. Useful, but I could still miss what they're trying to say or which part of their experience would help someone else.

I've had AI-written emails and Slack messages miss what I meant even when the wording read well. I had to go back and explain the context. That makes me cautious about doing this with someone else's work.

Say someone tells us about a decision that worked out. Before turning it into advice, I'd want to understand what they knew at the time and when they wouldn't make the same call. Otherwise we could take something that made sense in their situation and have them recommending it to everyone.

That's why I'm building an editorial partnership. I want to work out a rubric with each person. If someone's spent years leading teams through change, for example, I'd want to know what they had to explain to people and what they ended up changing themselves. A post that just tells people to communicate clearly wouldn't be doing much with that experience.

We'd put that in their rubric and keep working on a draft that left out what they'd learned, even if the writing already sounded like them. If we can eventually gather that context reliably through self-service, good. I'm not confident we're there yet.

And the stakes aren't just whether the client likes the post. They're trusting us to represent them, while their readers are trusting the person whose name is on it. If we've stretched their experience into a claim they can't stand behind, pointing to their approval wouldn't be much of an answer.

If someone else or AI is helping you write, pick a claim in the draft and ask what a reader might do because of it. Does your experience support that advice, including when it wouldn't apply? If it doesn't, I'd change the claim before trying to make it sound more like you.

Illustrative product mockup using the real app interface and a fictional example. Synthetic narration.