Recently I've been turning books I've found useful into reusable skills.
It sounds a little strange when I put it that way. Take something I've learned from a book, tease out the ideas that seem useful, and turn them into instructions that an AI can apply to my own work.
Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence was one of the books I tried this out with.
I've been using it to look more closely at my own sentences, particularly the ones that don't quite work. What interests me isn't having the AI rewrite them. It's being able to see the choices inside a sentence more clearly.
Take this one from my fiction vignette, The Record Says Otherwise:
"The last thing Sorn's father had left him was a cart, two mules, and forty bolts of river-dyed cloth worth enough to clear the family's debts and have something left over."
I think Fish might actually have liked it as its syntax is doing narrative work rather than merely delivering information. Its movement is fairly simple. We start with the person who left the inheritance, then get the inventory, its value, and finally what that value can accomplish.
What interested me was discovering what else the sentence could have done, and what each alternative revealed about the original.
The Fish skill gave me four possibilities.
Tighter subordination
"The last thing Sorn's father had left him—a cart, two mules, and forty bolts of river-dyed cloth—was worth enough to clear the family's debts and have something left over."
The em-dashes turn the inventory into a parenthetical interruption. The sentence's main assertion becomes clearer: what Sorn inherited was worth enough to clear the debts.
The turn emphasized
"Sorn's father had left him only a cart, two mules, and forty bolts of river-dyed cloth. It was enough to clear the family's debts and have something left over."
Breaking the sentence in two changes the rhythm. The first sentence establishes an apparently modest inheritance. The second delivers the turn. It's a standard practice, and one I've honed over the years as a technical writer.
Additive style
"A cart remained, and two mules, and forty bolts of river-dyed cloth—the last things Sorn's father had left him, and enough to clear the family's debts, and even have something left over."
Here the repeated and changes the movement of the sentence. Instead of arranging everything into a hierarchy, it accumulates. The sentence feels less controlled and more like someone taking stock of what remains.
Enactment
"What had Sorn's father left him? A cart. Two mules. Forty bolts of river-dyed cloth—worth enough to clear the family's debts and have something left over."
Now the sentence performs the act of counting and assessing. The question creates a small expectation, and the fragments answer it one item at a time.
None of these is the correct version.
That's the part of Fish's approach that I keep coming back to. A sentence isn't simply a container for information. Its structure changes what the information feels like. Put the same facts into a different shape and they can arrive differently: one arrangement can make them accumulate, another can make them turn or pause.
And this is where turning the book into an AI skill has become interesting for me.
The useful thing isn't that the skill can produce four alternatives. An AI can produce alternatives all day long.
What matters is having to look at them.
I can now see things I might previously have felt without being able to name. A subordinate clause doesn't just sit there doing grammar. It puts one piece of the sentence in service of another. A turn sometimes needs the space of a new sentence. Accumulation has a different feel from hierarchy. And sometimes the structure isn't merely describing an action. It's performing it.
That recognition is slowly becoming intuition.
The skill may look as though it's teaching the AI how to write like Fish. What it's really doing is making me practice seeing like Fish.
And that, I think, is the more interesting use of AI for writing.
I don't particularly need the machine to write better sentences for me. What I need is enough different ways of looking at my own sentences that my judgment gets sharper. The alternatives are useful because they give me something to push against.
If the skill is doing its job, I'll eventually need it less.
I don't want an AI that writes like me. I want one that makes me more conscious of what makes my writing mine.
