Writing Skills is Making a Comeback- Thanks to AI
When we were in school, I vividly remember my English teachers' unwavering efforts to get us to focus on our writing skills. The reasoning, as I understood, pertained to the comprehension skills that come with good writing. Alas, 13 or so years later it just hit me. If one can write better, they can understand a topic better. And vice versa. This is even more important to get good at, if not master, in the AI age.
Ever since ChatGPT released, LinkedIn has been flooded with prompt gurus with their promises. Everyone is trying to teach you how to prompt. Everyone of those gurus have their own secret sauce to prompt mastery. You can get access to it as well, that is, if you buy their course etc. My worry is not their sales tactics, after all, everyone has to make their money. My concern lies in their lack of concern for writing skills.
There is no secret formula to prompting-only guidelines. These guidelines are freely available on various corners of the internet. I will list them towards the end of this blog post (SEO boost bonus for my little corner on the internet too). These guidelines only serve as cautionary advice when it comes to talking to your favorite AI agent to get it to complete a task. Frankly, guidelines are great but they merely teach you how to polish your own prompt to feed to AI. You still need to create the context for the prompt. This will come through your writing skills as a direct result of your thinking.
If those LinkedIn prompt gurus switched to English Comprehension Courses they would make bank. The better you can write--> better context AI gets. This is all prompting boils down to. It was so simple yet the realization was lost in all the noise around the buzzwords ("prompt engineering"). Sometimes the simplest solutions stare at us out in the open yet elude us completely.
To test this out, think about something that you wanted to share with someone. Write it down with all the details (yes even the boring context too). Any story is going to work here. Make sure you write it as an article as if you were writing for one of your high school English assignments. Perfect. Now feed it to AI and ask it for answers/solutions. The difference in its response when you treat prompting as an English Language writing skill vs talking to the AI with assumptions is night and day. This is why I believe the most sought after skills in the future is going to be writing skills ability of employees, especially new graduates entering the workforce. Their point of contact for most work would be AI and getting it to do the job would require them to feeding it the prompts based on the writing skills methodology that was taught to them in their schooling years.
As for me, I appreciate my old teachers even more now. Especially my 11th Grade English teacher- Ms Deepti. Even though I was a fairly inattentive kid back then; she tried to make us notice the power of writing skills. She predicted the future, in her own comprehension.