I have been writing short-form technical posts on LinkedIn regularly for the last 18 months. Over that time, my followers grew from 1,800 to 4,274. Here is a breakdown of my short-form writing process.
My writing process has three steps.
Step 1: Finding an idea. I pick an idea that is fresh in my mind, something I worked on or learned within the last day or two. I don’t go too far back. Reconstructing my memory takes time that I don’t have. The freshness gives me extra excitement because the details are still vivid and I want to share them right away. If I wait too long, I forget the details and the emotional attachment weakens.
For example, yesterday I published a post after finishing a chapter from AI-Powered Search. Last week I published a post on calling an LLM from Db2 using SQL, written the same day as the tutorial on a Git repo. Both were fresh in my mind.
If there are multiple candidate ideas, I trust my intuition and go with the one I feel a strong pull for.
Step 2: Developing the idea. I have two methods for coming up with the first draft: dictation and writing by hand. Which one I use depends on how heavy the idea is.
For lighter content, I use dictation. This includes announcing a tutorial, reposting someone else’s post with my own brief thoughts, or sharing a lighter non-technical topic like a productivity tip. In all these cases, the actual content is already developed and published, either in a Git repo or by someone else, or it’s light. Dictation saves time, and it is still my own voice, my own language, my own tone. It becomes a conversation.
For deeper technical content, I brainstorm quite a bit. For example, last week I published a post on multi-vector representation. That is a complex topic and something new I came across. I ask myself: what is the concept I want to convey? I drew a mind map of the concepts, then I wrote the post by hand. I don’t type it on the computer. I take a screenshot of my handwritten notes, give it to AI, and ask it to transcribe them into a digital note. Then I work with it digitally for editing.
Step 3: Editing. I keep drafting and editing as two separate steps. I do not edit while I am writing the first draft. My goal is a messy first draft with all the grammatical mistakes, spelling errors, and missing ideas. I do not pause to edit.
Once I have the draft in digital form, I go through the editing phase in multiple passes.
I ask Claude to check for grammatical mistakes, fix them, and put every fix in bold. For each fix, I ask it to add an explanation in italic, following the fix, so I can review all the fixes along with its explanation. I review each grammar fix and the explanation, and either accept or reject.
Then a redundancy check. I ask Claude to identify the redundancies in my draft and put a comment next to each one in italics. If I agree, I accept the cuts.
Then a clutter check, following William Zinsser’s editing principles from On Writing Well. Same strategy: keep the changes in bold, show the explanation in italics.
Finally, I ask it to identify and fix any ambiguity. For example, if there is a pronoun and it is not clear what it points to, I ask it to be more specific.
After these passes, I have a final draft. I read it out loud from beginning to end. If any part doesn’t sound like my voice, i.e., the AI editing has taken away my tone, style, or language, I speak it out loud to the AI and say: use my version, what I just dictated, instead of that line in the draft.
Then I read it again from beginning to end. If it sounds like my own voice, I add line breaks so it is readable on LinkedIn, paste it in, and read it one more time to make sure nothing was lost or broken during copying. If it all looks good, I click post.