Note: This post is part of the Voices for Education Justice series—a practical guide for anyone ready to speak out about harm in schools. Whether you’re building a blog, drafting your first post, or finding the courage to hit publish, this series is here to remind you: your words carry weight, your story matters, and silence is not the price of survival.
Many people carry shame and the belief that they cannot write—because their spelling has been judged, because their ADHD has scattered their thoughts across too many open tabs, because their dyslexia has made every sentence a terrain to decode, or because geography, trauma, or bureaucracy has kept them far from the centres of publication and approval. But writing is not a gate. It is a practice, a rhythm, a shape your voice already knows how to take.
This is a follow-up to this blog:
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So you want to write a blog? I think you should!
If you’ve been carrying stories that feel too heavy to hold alone—email drafts, meeting memories, car-cry voice notes, or a feeling in your chest that something must be said—then I believe you’re ready. You don’t need perfect grammar, a polished voice, or a…
I want you to know that I have ADHD and undiagnosed dyslexia. I am gifted (for whatever that’s worth as an adult with a nervous system like a hamster) and I doing my autism assessment next month. While, I learned to read early, I didn’t learn how to write until sixth grade. I still want to assure you:
If you can speak, you can write.
If you can feel, you can write. If you have pain, you can write. If you can remember, you can write. Tools like voice dictation, phone notes, and AI can help transform what you already know into words that move.
I wrote 200,000 words in six months
I decided at Christmas to write this blog and six months later I’m 200,000 words approximately. While it took me days to write the first pieces, now I can write eight pieces a day on the weekend and many are approaching 3000 words. And I am only getting started, in terms of telling the story.
Before this, I spent years writing personal reflections, generating thousands of pages of freewriting, fragments, and notes. Sadly, advocacy with the school system has also generated thousands of pages of emails and documents. I received an FOI response with 20,000 pages, though much of that is duplicated. I’ve maybe processed 1/10th of that archive.
Often, I take a passage from those archives and drop it into ChatGPT, asking for themes or story ideas; then, I go for a walk or stand in the shower or drive with Otter running on the seat beside me, and I speak aloud the rest of what I’m trying to say—trying to remember what it felt like when it happened, to follow the rhythm of my thoughts without overthinking.
From there, I ask for something to be written and I ask for it to be written in my voice. I want to share what I’ve learned for others who are trying to stay recognisably human in a digital landscape.
1. The clipped cadence of the machine
There are immediate tells when something was written by ChatGPT, but the one that always hits me hardest is the cadence: the short, staccato sentences that mimic social media more than thought, ticking across the screen with the dry rhythm of a clock or the hard sound of a keyboard—never lingering, never stretching, never taking the scenic route.
I understand why it writes this way—much of its training data comes from web-friendly content designed for speed, efficiency, and skim-readability—but it’s more than a stylistic tic; it reflects a flattened, masculinised voice that prizes brevity and assertiveness and treats emotion as either excess or risk.
My sentences are long because my thoughts are long, because my life has required me to hold multiple truths at once. I see everyone’s perspective at the same time, and I hold the big picture as I speak. So I circle, I zoom in, I double back, I interrupt myself, I wait for the right word to surface instead of grabbing the nearest one. I pause for breath. I allow my sentences to carry weight, to bend under the pressure of what they’re holding.
So I ask for what I need: an average sentence length of 220 characters; the liberal use of em dashes (my favourite), semicolons, and parentheses; a rhythm that mimics the sound of water moving over uneven stones—always flowing, sometimes catching, occasionally rushing, but never machine-gun rapid.
2. The defensive stance of negation
Another pattern I see constantly in ChatGPT’s drafts is the obsessive use of negation: a kind of anticipatory defence mechanism that tries to pre-empt the reader’s disbelief by qualifying everything, clarifying the absence of extremity, insisting that something wasn’t that bad, just a little bad, as if the primary concern is plausible deniability rather than clarity or truth.
The result is a thousand sentences like: I wasn’t feeling great—not that it was the worst I’d ever felt—but I had a tinge of nausea, which are structurally cautious and emotionally incoherent. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.
This isn’t how I speak. Well, maybe sometimes—but only when I’m afraid.
Most of the time, I don’t think in reversals or defensiveness. I state what happened declaratively, because I assume the reader is either here to bear witness or isn’t worth writing for. I assume I will be believed inherently, because I struggle to lie.
The volume of negation in ChatGPT writing reveals a worldview shaped by a paranoid, low-trust Internet—a culture built for criticism, more concerned with optics than ideas.
So I tell ChatGPT to eliminate negative constructions entirely—to remove the word “not,” to focus on what is present and lived and embodied, to narrate in declarative, dynamic, emotionally precise statements, always assuming that the truth is its own justification.
I ask for language that names what was, without prevarication or apology.
3. Voice begins in the body, not on the page
People often imagine ChatGPT as a tool for writing from scratch, but I rarely use it that way. When I ask it to generate a piece without input, I almost always hate the results, because they feel placeless, bloodless, generic.
Editing that kind of writing takes more time than starting with my voice.
Instead, I begin with motion—walking, driving, showering—and I voice dictate. I let my thoughts come out in the form they naturally take, which is rarely linear or clean. I cry, purge unexpected vitriol, contradict myself, say things twice, forget my line of thought and start over, think of a new tangent and follow it. Then I share the transcript with ChatGPT and ask it to shape what I’ve said into something legible without losing the shape it first arrived in.
There is something essential about trusting the cadence of the spoken word over the stiffness of a blinking cursor.
4. If it can’t hear your voice, teach it
Sometimes I begin with a sample—something I wrote that felt true, or something I read that hit. I say: Write it like this. I describe the sentence length, the affect, the turns of phrase. I give it a structure, or a list of moments, or a tone. I ask it to draft something in Canvas, then I edit the first two paragraphs until they sound like me, and then I say: Now match this. And it does, mostly.
5. Refusing to flatten, insisting on truth
For ideators—those who love generating ideas but struggle to put them in order or know where to begin—ChatGPT can be the perfect collaborator. But only if you treat it like an instrument, not a ghostwriter. Only if you remember that your voice is shaped by the way you breathe, the way you grieve, the way you circle a truth before speaking it plainly.
Your voice begins in the body. Let the machine follow you—never the other way around.
Here’s a prompt to sound like my voice:
“Rewrite this in a long, flowing, emotionally resonant style using Canadian spelling and Oxford style punctuation. Avoid short sentences, passive voice, and negative constructions. Prioritise clarity, emotional depth, and poetic cadence. Use long sentences (average 220+ characters) with semicolons, em dashes, and parentheses. Let the rhythm circle, pause, and unfold slowly—like a thought half-spoken aloud before it is written. The tone should blend academic rigour with feminist precision and personal interiority. Avoid generic phrases and ensure the voice feels lived-in, exacting, and embodied.”
You are perfect already
If none of this makes any fucking sense to you, start anyway.
You don’t need to understand AI, writing, sentence structure, or rhythm to be legitimate.
You don’t need to build a system, create a series, or follow any prompt.
You just need to begin—right in the middle, with whatever is spilling out. There is no ceremony required to start telling the truth.
