Twenty years ago the tremors started in the tips of my fingers. I was in my early thirties, young enough that the doctors kept rechecking the chart before they’d tell me what they were seeing. Golf went first. You can’t putt with hands that vote against you, and I’d spent thousands of hours on a practice green earning a short game that stopped mattering. The handwriting went slower, over several years, and when it got bad enough I quit journaling, which I’d done since I was a kid.
These days I can type a few usable words a minute on a good day, with errors I can’t reliably fix afterward. So I talk.
Every essay, post, and comment I’ve published in the last several years started as my voice in a room. Dictation software turns the sound into text and gets most of it right, which is doing well given how I’m prone to mumbling. Claude and Grammarly now handle the repairs after that. Punctuation mostly never arrives in a dictated transcript, and when my speech gets bad the software starts guessing at words, so somebody has to put the sentences back the way I said them. The arguments and the numbers and the stories are mine, and so are the jokes that don’t land.
I’m explaining my setup because of what happened next.
On July 30, LinkedIn shipped a button that lets any member flag a post as AI generated. Flagged content gets reduced distribution. The account holder gets no notice, no stated standard, no appeal, and no undo. I know about the undo part with more certainty than I’d like, because the man who flagged one of my comments later apologized in public, said he’d take me at my word, and went to remove his flag. He came back a few minutes later to report that the platform gave him no way to do it. He was decent about the whole thing, which somehow made it worse to watch.
Since early August my impressions are down about 50-70% from July. My weekly article reached only 24 people in the first 90 minutes last week beyond the subscribers who get it by email. I’ve published daily for ten years and I sit near 13,000 followers, and nobody at the platform has been able to tell me which lever made those numbers stop adding up. There’s a case open through LinkedIn’s Disability Answer Desk, and the people there have been professional with me so far, though completely silent for two weeks now.
While the review runs I went back to the only thing I control, my own process. I’ve spent thirty years telling owners to quit arguing with outcomes and fix the system underneath, so I took my own advice. Here’s what I write under now.
I dictate long and messy. I speak the piece the way I’d argue it across a table, restarts and tangents included, and I don’t stop to fix anything mid-flow. Back when I corrected as I went, everything came out in short uniform sentences, which is exactly the pattern that gets called machine writing now. So the mess stays in until the end.
I save the raw take. The audio file and the untouched transcript get dated and archived before any tool touches them. If you dictate your writing, do this. If anyone ever presses a button on you, you’ll be holding a recording of yourself saying the words.
The correction pass repairs and doesn’t rewrite. My instructions to the tools are narrow. Fix transcription errors, fix punctuation, fix sentence boundaries, and where the audio was unclear, mark the spot instead of guessing. I had to learn to tell the tools no rephrasing, in those words, because they want to help, and what their help does over a few passes is make my paragraph sound like everyone else’s.
Grammarly gets spelling and agreement and nothing else. The clarity and engagement suggestions stay off. Those features exist to move every writer toward one register, and I’ve watched what happens to that register on LinkedIn lately.
I read the draft back out loud before it publishes. Anywhere it sounds smoother than I talk, I roughen it. The test is the one I’ve used on client memos since the nineties. Would I say this sentence across a table to a managing partner I’ve known ten years, or does it sound like a keynote.
And every piece carries at least one real number. A figure from an actual matter or an actual month, rounded and anonymized, but real, because that’s the one thing generic content can’t produce, whoever or whatever wrote it.
Two things I decided against. I won’t run drafts through AI detectors, because the research puts their accuracy near a coin flip, and chasing their approval would bend my voice further than any correction tool has. And I won’t seed fake typos. I have the audio, and performing sloppiness would be its own kind of fake.
And because this letter runs on the economics of a one-owner firm, I’ll run the read on myself. The protocol isn’t free. Archiving the takes, running the tighter correction passes, and reading every draft back out loud adds time, call it an hour a piece, and I publish multiple essays and articles weekly across several properties. The case adds more. Screenshots, correspondence, analytics pulls, and the hours I’ve spent proving I wrote my own sentences. August has taken something like a working week out of my calendar so far. I run one-owner businesses, so those hours came from where they always come from in a firm like yours, out of the work that pays. Contribution per owner hour is the number this letter exists to protect, and mine went down this month for reasons that had nothing to do with my clients or my craft. When an enforcement error lands on a one-owner firm there’s no associate to hand it to, so the owner carries it, usually in the evening, after the paying work.
The part that stays unfortunate is that none of this should be necessary. A disabled writer shouldn’t need an evidence chain to prove he wrote his own sentences, and a platform shouldn’t attach permanent distribution consequences to a button with no standard behind it. I asked one of the flag movement’s advocates which level of AI involvement earns a flag, since he’d published a scoring system for it that morning. He told me, “it’s in the eye of the beholder...” I’ve thought about his answer every day since, because he wasn’t wrong about how the button works. That is how it works.
Twenty years ago the tremors took the putter and the pen. They don’t get the writing.
-Sheets