January 12, 2026 – I’m approaching the midpoint of my social-media-free January (excluding this blog, of course).

So I’ve been reading books instead.

It’s not that I didn’t read books before. It just took longer. So I read fewer of them and I had fewer meta-thoughts about how I approach reading books. Since I stopped my doom scrolling, I’ve read five or six books. Some of these books were good. Some of them, not so much.

Of course, the not-so-good category was 100% comprised of topics that I thought were interesting. Why else did I start reading them. But they all failed in one way or another.

This is the occupational hazard of being both a writer and an editor. I have a tendency—even when off the clock—to think about how I would write things differently.

This happens even with the good books that I read, though the fixes I fixate on tend to be more trivial—like typos. The fixes I come up with for the not-so-good books often come down to one complaint: the author didn’t think about their audience.

When you or I have a conversation with a person, there’s immediate feedback about whether the other person is getting what you are saying or not. They may laugh, they may get angry, they may ask questions. And you are then able to fix your message on the fly, if they aren’t understanding what you meant.

This gets harder as the size of your audience grows. But as long as it’s in-person, it’s still possible to get feedback. Ask any stand-up comedian.

When you write, it’s a different story. You have to put yourself the shoes of your audience. As creative as your written words may be, it’s an even more creative act to imagine how your audience might react—and to shape your writing to maximize the chance that your audience will get what you are trying to say.

I’d say that most writers are more focused on their own ideas than on the act of communicating to another person. Great writers do both. Sad to say, most of the books I’ve been reading have not been by great writers. And they didn’t have editors who could help them communicate what they were trying to say.

In these days of spell and grammar check, many publishers think they can get away without editors altogether.

It will only get worse with AI assisted writing. Before AI, all books at least had a human being at one end of the communication chain. Now, it’s possible to have zero humans in the chain—not the writer nor the reader.

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