Why AI Overwrites and What to Do About It

This blog post explains why you want to apply two techniques when you use AI tools to write: 1) give the tool an outline of your main points; and 2) use the content test to find irrelevant and redundant content.

AI tools tend to overwrite. When people complain about receiving bad AI writing, their main complaints are about the wordiness. For example, this article describes poorly written AI content (“workslop”) as

• “...a lot of text without saying anything substantive…in the same overly wordy style.”

• “...long, fancy-sounding, copy-pasted language that doesn’t say anything.”

• “...using three paragraphs of text when one bullet point would suffice.”

The issue is not just that individual sentences are too long but that too many sentences are saying the same thing—or nothing at all.

The Writing Approach Is the Problem

As large language models (LLMs), AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Co-Pilot, tend toward wordiness because of how they work. LLMs write one word at a time. They move in one direction, choosing the word most likely to appear next. They make this choice based on complex math for determining probability, having trained on massive datasets of written material.

This approach to writing is similar to a human writing by stream-of-consciousness: ever moving forward, not looking back, adding one word at a time. If you have taken one of our Writing System courses, you know that we recommend against writing by stream-of-consciousness. This approach often results in documents that stray from your main point, sending the reader on a needlessly long journey with no defined destination. 

Readers resent the time and effort they spend trying to understand wordy documents with buried or missing points. In the same article mentioned above, people who received AI workslop reported being annoyed (53%), confused (38%), and even offended (22%).

Wordy AI writing "that doesn't say anything" annoys, confuses, and offends readers.

Fortunately, our advice for avoiding overwriting in human writing applies to writing with AI too: outline your main points before you write, and use our content test when you revise.

Use Outlines with AI Tools

We recommend outlines for human writers because outlining forces you to do “the thinking” as a separate task from composing. With the Writing System, we emphasize how multi-tasking is not effective or efficient. One common example of this inefficient multi-tasking is when a writer tries to decide what to say and why—“the thinking”—at the same time as composing details in the form of sentences. 

Outlining your main points before you compose the supporting details increases efficiency in more than one way, including by reducing rewriting. Writers who compose without an outline risk having to reorganize their draft afterward. That reorganization requires rewriting—as much as 80% of the original draft. You avoid this risk by following an outline, which forced you to organize your ideas before you got bogged down in details.

AI’s powerful pattern recognition can help it generate writing that looks similar to what you need, but that’s all the more reason for you to first decide what you need to say.

The risk of rewriting is the same with AI because AI doesn’t do “the thinking” either. AI can’t tell fact from fiction. It does not understand the meaning of what it writes. AI’s powerful pattern recognition can help it generate writing that looks similar to what you need, but that’s all the more reason for you to first decide what you need to say. Evaluating AI writing becomes much harder if you don’t yet know what you’re looking for, especially since AI writing looks so much cleaner than most humans’ first drafts. 

Since you have to do “the thinking” to evaluate AI writing anyway, you might as well do it before you use the tool. By adding a list of your main points to your prompt, you can guide the AI tool in a direction that ultimately saves you time without sacrificing quality.

See chapter four of the textbook for tips on how to outline and examples. You can also ask us directly for an example.

Use the Content Test on AI Content

In our classes, we tell participants that the content test is most important when you 1) wrote without using an outline first, or 2) are reviewing someone else’s writing. 

You need to treat AI writing like reviewing someone else’s writing. Even if you wrote a detailed prompt and gave the tool your own content, the AI is responsible for deciding which words to include and in what order. These decisions affect the meaning and relevance of the content.

And if you did not include an outline in your prompt, using the content test becomes even more important. In this case, you also want to run the organization test, which we provide in chapter six of the textbook.

Table 1 lists the five main questions in our content test and adds special considerations for testing the content in AI writing. 

Content Test Question	Additional Considerations for AI Writing
What is the topic?	You likely stated your topic in your prompt. Ensure that the AI writing not only covers that topic but does not overwrite by covering other, irrelevant topics.
So what, or why do I (the audience) care?	Ideally, you stated your intended audience in your prompt. Now ask of each paragraph and each supporting sentence what that audience does with the information. If your answer is the same for more than one paragraph, you have redundant information that you need to cut.
Specified how, or how do you know?	Examine vague claims. Look at sentences with some of that “overly wordy style” common to AI writing and ask if you have the details to support those vague claims. For example, if a paragraph begins with claims about your “far-reaching expertise” and “robust qualifications,” the following sentences must provide sufficient detail to support those claims.
Is it true?	Because AI is always going to hallucinate, check that your details are accurate. If you see a detail that did not come from the content you prompted the AI to use, double-check that detail in particular.
Says who?	For audiences who need proof, add citations or other evidence of authority to your details. Check all AI-generated citations to ensure that the cited source 1) does in fact provide the detail you cited it for, and 2) exists as cited.

Remember: AI Is a Tool, Not a Writer or a Process

AI writing becomes ineffective and inefficient when the human writer relies on the tool as a replacement for the writer and the writing process. You don’t assume that using Microsoft Word is the same as writing. Typing on a typewriter is not the same as writing. Even putting pen to paper is not necessarily “writing.” 

All of these tools can help you communicate your message in writing. But to write effectively, you must do the decision making behind your message. To write efficiently, you must align the tool to your process, not the other way around. 

Readability: 8.8