On AI, Clarity, and How I plan to Work
By: Joy Stephenson-Laws, J.D.
I spent more than forty years as a healthcare litigator and that work requires the ability to write clearly.
I did not write to impress anyone. I wrote in a manner that a reader who has to make a decision can actually follow and understand me. A brief the judge cannot follow has failed, no matter how clever it is. Clarity was never a style preference in my profession. It was the job.
For years, I have tried to carry that same discipline into my work in health and wellness. The reader here is not a judge. It is someone trying to understand their own body, usually while being handed information that was written for somebody else. Making that information accurate, clear, and something they can actually use is what I care about most.
And there is far more of it to deliver than I can write alone.
So I looked into whether AI could help. I did not take anyone's word for it. I tested it against my own writing. What I found surprised me — the detection tools often cannot tell the difference, and portions of my own writing, produced without any AI at all, come back flagged as AI-generated. My conclusion is that with careful direction, it can help. It takes on some of the labor of getting complicated material into plain language. That means I can publish more, price my books more reasonably, and still have a life outside the work.
How I use it, and what I commit to
I decide what each piece argues and how it is built. The framework, the structure, and the judgment are mine.
I will use AI to draft some prose to my specifications and I will check for consistency and clarity. How much it does varies from one project to the next. I read every line and rule on every line.
My job is not to spend the afternoon writing the perfect sentence. It is to bring discernment to the material — to ask whether the information is accurate, whether the source is credible, and whether it holds up. As an attorney, I am particularly skilled in that ability. That is where my time goes now, and it is the better use of it.
I verify accuracy myself. For one of my books that meant auditing all ninety-five references one by one against PubMed and Europe PMC, and correcting every error I found. That is my standard. I do not lower it because a draft happens to arrive quickly.
I write in plain language on purpose, and I check whether I actually pulled it off. My chapters are written to be read at roughly an eighth-grade level, because information nobody can follow helps nobody.
I take responsibility for every word published under my name, however it reached the page.
What this covers
This applies to my non-fiction writing going forward — my non-fiction books and my articles — unless I say otherwise.
Given where this technology now stands, I think I would be doing a disservice not to use it in the places where it lets me do more for the people I write for. It saves time, it works, and the practical result is that accurate health information reaches more people, sooner, at a price they can afford.