How to make your voice shine through in the age of AI

I saw AI transform undergraduate essays while teaching at Columbia University. More and more bright students gradually lost their voices to the same sort of awkward, schematic, lifeless writing that sounded written by a computer. Reading hundreds of essays tuned my ear for AI to the same sensitivity as any admission officer’s. We’re always asking the same questions when we first pick up an essay: did AI write this? Or summon its ideas? Or shape its structure? Put differently, what we want to know before anything else is: is there anybody home? 

I’ve read too many student essays that come off a bit uncanny, like a slightly haunted house. The writing might be technically correct, hyper-organized, without error, but everything rings a little hollow when I knock. I walk through all the rooms, but can’t find the person who lives there. It’s spooky.

‍Relying on an AI model—even just for brainstorming and organizing— leads towards the same sort of formulaic essays that college admissions officers read over and over again: cliched, vague, taking a set of conventional premises towards a predictable conclusion.  AI makes your writing sound the same as everyone else’s; I push your writing to sound like it could only have been written by you.  I love helping students craft clear, creative essays that are bursting with their voice, so that admissions officers can tell immediately, to their real relief, that at least for one essay, someone is clearly home.