It’s the start of a new year and as usual, I’ve been receiving emails from my readers about how to start technical writing in 2026. A lot of people tell me they want to start technical writing/blogging, but I noticed recently, they ask questions like:

• What can I write about when I’m still learning while AI knows everything?

• How do I use AI to write without sounding like everyone else?

• I’m not confident writing without using AI, what should I do?

Notice how every question is AI-related. This is quite interesting to me because when I started technical writing in 2019, writers are simply people who can ideate and write (without any AI assistant). Look at us now, just 7 years later, and everyone is fully reliant on LLMs to write for them.

I admit, I too had boarded on the AI train, and used it a lot for writing emails, posts and rephrasing my articles to sound better. We are a society focused on results and efficiency. So if everyone is doing it and producing so much output so quickly, there is the pressure to follow suit.

But despite the fact I used AI to a certain extent, my readers told me that my articles still sound like me. In fact, they can imagine my voice speaking to them as they read my articles. So what exactly is going on here?

It is a simple truth. AI did not kill technical writing or blogging. It exposed something else.

A lot of people are now clicking “Publish” after copying and pasting text straight from a chatbot. That’s why you might notice many blogs sounding strangely similar. There’s even a Wiki page on these AI-generated text patterns.

Now this is not saying that you can’t use AI tools for technical writing at all, but you don’t need to use AI to start, especially if you haven’t found a clear writing style yet. In this article, I'll share some strategies to help you reduce your reliance on AI, discover your unique writing voice, and learn how to leverage AI to speed up the writing process while keeping your personal style.

Blogging was never about Writing

Before we get into the topic, I have to preface with this. Believe it or not, I am terrible at writing. I don’t have perfect grammar (that’s why I use a grammar tool), extensive vocabulary or polished paragraphs. Luckily, blogging and technical writing is not about being a phenomenal writer.

Technical writing is simply:

1. You learned something

2. It was confusing or something new/cool

3. You figured it out

4. You documented it so that you can refer back to it, and someone else can too

The best articles I have read are rarely the most polished ones. They are not encyclopedic or overly comprehensive. Instead, they're about the connection, the shared frustration or genuine curiosity you feel with the writer. As you read through the article, you gain a story or value from the writer.

And that’s why you should start writing in the first place. To provide value to yourself and others.

I started writing because I had ZERO technical knowledge and a lot of tutorials skipped steps, assuming people know. And I was tired of pretending I understood faster than I did.

Why You Should Start Writing without AI

Yes I know. You want to put out as many articles as you can. Everyone writes fast and you felt the pressure. So you start prompting chatGPT to give you quick answers, and that’s how you sound confident, with polished paragraphs, perfect grammar and profound vocabulary.

But can you remember what you wrote?

A reader recently told me, “I enjoyed your focus article so much!”

And I immediately knew they were talking about my “What it means to be focused” article I wrote back in 2021. It’s 5 years ago, but I remembered 80-90% of what I wrote in that article. Because I wrote every word, I typed and re-typed paragraphs, I revised the outline and content several times for that article. I even remembered I finally finished it after sitting for about 3 hours at Starbucks. The drink was an ice latte by the way.

Relying on AI to write your articles completely takes away the process of figuring out how to write your article in the first place. Understanding what you want to convey to your audience is a part of being a writer. If every word, paragraph and thought or idea is generated by something else and not you, your voice won’t be in it.

And readers can feel that.

When every article sounds too “perfect”, funnily enough, it becomes less trustworthy to read. When you share clear, amazing steps in a tutorial but haven't learned the process behind them, the knowledge won't stick.

On the other hand, when you write without AI, especially at the beginning of your writing journey, you are forced to think before you explain. You write things in the order you understood them, not the order that looks good in every other blog or documentation generated by AI.

That is how your voice forms naturally. Readers would feel it is as if you are talking to them, teaching them the process you learn. Because your voice is not something AI can generate.

How to Write Without AI

AI has evolved to the point of no return for humans. Nowadays, a lot of us probably can’t last a day without opening chatGPT (or any other equivalent ones) and prompting it for something. After all, it is fast, efficient and can sound quite human-like with the right prompts.

If you want to start writing in 2026, it is almost impossible NOT to feel like you should be using AI. And yes, it goes the same for me.

I used a lot of AI for my social posts and emails, a bit less for my blog. Still, somewhere along the way, I noticed a quiet problem started to surface. A lot of my writing became emotionally flat (?), like it just sounded clean but forgettable. I can’t really remember the articles I wrote in 2023-2024. Probably that was the period I used the most AI for my writing.

So the question is not: How to write without AI (the header is misleading, oops)

It is: How to write while leveraging AI without losing your voice

Here are some of my strategies that helped me reduce my reliance on it and find a good balance to use it for efficiency but still keeping my style.

1) Write first, then optimize

Once you get used to AI, this is probably a hard habit to build. But once you unlearned your instinct to prompt first, and instead actually sit down and write yourself first, it will change everything.

You will no longer skip the most important part about writing: thinking.

So write the first draft yourself, without AI. Force your brain to confront what you want to convey, what you know and what you lack. Some parts you wrote may sound awkward, but just write.

I give myself a rule: First draft is mine. There will be messy/awkward sentences, half-baked ideas and everything in between. And it’s totally okay.

Only after that, you may use AI to polish it but to keep your voice, I usually give very explicit boundaries such as only taking a section I thought was written vaguely or lacks structure. And my typical prompt would look like this:

I wrote this draft myself.
Do not rewrite it in a generic or corporate tone.
Do not add new ideas or examples.

Your task is to:
• improve clarity where sentences are confusing
• tighten wording without changing my voice
• fix grammar and flow issues
• keep the tone conversational and human

If something is unclear, point it out instead of rewriting it.

So this way, I’m not asking AI to rewrite it in their voice, but to optimize my thinking, words and clarity.

Another rule I set myself: If AI rephrases a line where I no longer recognize myself, it’s better to undo and keep my original sentence. Again, this is to keep the authenticity and personality in my articles.

Other ways you can use AI without overwriting your voice are:

• Generate a more SEO-friendly title

• Generate a more SEO-friendly subtitle

• Generate a metadata description

• Generate tags for the article

2) Your writing is a form of documentation, but it shouldn’t sound like a generic one

Most of my readers who become technical writers have this mindset that technical writing on a personal blog should sound like a documentation by a corporation.

If you’re writing for a company, that may be true, but on your own blog where your writing style is your personal brand, that would be the fastest way to lose your voice - when your blog sounds like a manual.

Instead, write the way you would explain something to a teammate you trust. Someone who would ask follow-up questions. Someone who does not need you to sound impressive.

You might notice in some of my articles, I would imagine a conversation between you, the reader, and myself such as, a reader might ask:

But Victoria, I just can’t help using AI for everything!

And then I would continue my article as if I am addressing that imaginary question directly.

This is a simple trick I use to build a connection through my articles while keeping them conversational, so they don't sound too much like documentation or a scientific paper. Try doing this on your next article and let me know! I would want to read that article.

3) Read material not written by AI

With the rise of AI-generated content, even if you don't use AI for writing, you might still be influenced if you read a lot of AI-generated material. This could affect your writing style, as many technical writers might unknowingly adopt the neutral, matter-of-fact tone typical of AI-generated content.

The easiest way to spot this influence is to read your own writing after a few days. If it feels flat, impersonal, or like something you’d see on a corporate blog, chances are your brain is unconsciously echoing AI-generated patterns.

To counter this, I intentionally read older books. It’s hard to tell from recent blogs if they’re 100% written by a human. I may sometimes come across some blogs that may sound opinionated and conversational, with inside jokes and personal anecdotes. But the books I read are definitely written by humans because they are published before the generative AI era. Some books I recommend:

• Mastery by Robert Green

• The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Green

• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

• Thinking Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

And more on this list if you head to my Nerd Stuff page.

Shameless plug: Another set of non-AI generated material you can read are my personal book reviews/reflections series or any article I wrote on this blog before 2023 haha

After reading these fully human written material, try to manifest that in your writing. Don’t copy the ideas but be inspired from the rhythm, the tone, the energy that make it human-like. Gradually, your brain will be able to internalize what sounds authentic and real vs the generic AI tone.

4) Don’t rush your writing

Another strategy to keep your use of AI to a minimum is to not feel like you owe someone an article in a few hours. AI gives you something right away, a polished article. So the temptation to use it for efficiency gets harder to resist the more you focused on getting things out fast.

Instead, focus on the process and don’t rush to finish your writing in one sitting. Write a paragraph or a section, then take a break. Go for a walk, make a cup of tea, do something unrelated. When you come back, read it aloud. Does it sound like you? Does it feel like you’re talking to someone, rather than delivering a memo? If not, tweak it. Sometimes I end up rewriting entire sentences because I hear my own voice and realize it’s off.

Even right now, I have several articles sitting in my drafts. Some of them are on topics I am very passionate about and that’s why they are taking longer to write. I want to convey them in the same way I visioned but I couldn’t find right words, examples and structure at this moment. So I pinned them in my drafts and go back to them in between breaks to take another look and see if I can get some progress in them.

Experiencing writer’s block is something normal for a lot of writers. But with so many AI writers now, perhaps my Top 6 Strategies to Overcome Writer’s Block will be redundant in the future.

This also works for spotting places where your thinking is fuzzy. If a paragraph doesn’t make sense to your own brain after a break, imagine how confusing it would be to a reader. Then fix it, before any AI even sees it.

5) Embrace Imperfection

Last but not least, it is to let go of the idea that your articles must be perfect before they are published. So many fellow writers asked me to review their article before they publish. Sure, it’s good to get feedback, but the best feedback is actually not from me, but your audience.

So get the article out first, let everyone read it. When reviewing an article for someone, unless there are technical errors, I usually think the article is ready to publish. Some small tweaks I suggest can be subjective and not worth editing. I would much rather you publish the article, get feedback from the public, take the constructive ones, ignore the insulting ones and iterate the process to improve your writing that way.

Publishing is part of the writing process, not the final step after everything feels safe and polished. The moment your article is out in the world, it stops being “just an idea” and starts becoming real. Some will misunderstand parts of it. Some will resonate deeply. Some will disagree. That feedback loop is where your voice sharpens.

If you wait until an article feels perfect, you’re usually just waiting until it feels less vulnerable. And that’s often the version that sounds the least like you. So publish it while it still has edges.

The Final Verdict

AI did not kill writing, but it exposes those who haven’t built a voice. In an era where text can be instantly generated, writing that sounds like a person can actually help you stand out. Not because it is perfect, but because it is real.

I hope this article convinces you to not only start your writing journey to build a voice for yourself, but also to slow down and think before you outsource that voice to a tool.

Again, I emphasize that you do not have to NOT use AI. It is something you can leverage when you learn to write without it first. Once you can do that, AI stops being a crutch that you depend everything on, and becomes an assistant to help you move faster.

Thanks for reading! See you in the next article! Cheers!

Let's Connect!

• Twitter

• LinkedIn

• GitHub

• ragTech

• WomenDevsSG