Your First Draft is an Adult Coloring Book

_{Day 99/100 Oh, it’s close now…}

Hey—It's Tim. 

So you just wrote a first draft.
Yay. So happy for you.

But let’s be honest:

Your first draft is just an adult coloring book. You got the lines. You picked a picture.

Now? You have to add the shading, the highlights, the weird glittery purple bit you used by accident but now kinda works.

Editing is where you turn words into work.

When I was building Penfriend, I went through hundreds of AI articles.

They were decent.
Some were great.
But none of them felt like mine.

Until I edited them.

That’s where the YOURS process came from:

• Your voice – The main reason we edit. Does it feel like you? Read like you?

• Optimize – Increase ranking via SEO. Add places for social distribution

• Update – Check the facts, the numbers, the quotes, the stats. Update them to suit.

• Relatable – Add your own experience here. Remember we’re a human talking to another human. Stories and first hand accounts work here.

• Strengthen – Weak content is boring content. We make content strong via videos, images, quotes. Think multimedia

It’s a checklist. A ritual. A flour-dusted workbench for turning auto-generated dough into chewy, crusty, one-of-a-kind content.

I wrote a 4,235 article on this process if you want the long version.

Consider this email the TL:DR.

Your voice

Most of us are starting the entire writing process with AI.
No judgement.
I am too.
I would not be able to produce as much as I do without it.

The biggest complaint I hear about this?
AI doesn’t sounds like me.

You have a voice. AI doesn’t.

Editing for voice means:

• Changing robotic phrases to sound like you.

• Breaking predictable structures.

• Making it read like a human, not a manual.

AI is great at structure. But it repeats. It loops. It tries to sound smart. You? You just need to sound like yourself.

✅ With Penfriend: our Echo tool helps you find and replace lines that don’t sound like you - so every paragraph feels like something you actually said.

You can just tell when content doesn’t feel human. It’s that weird “written Uncanny Valley.” Close... but hollow. Editing is what pulls it back into something real.

Quick test: Read it out loud. If you wouldn’t say it to a friend, you shouldn’t publish it.

Optimize

You should have an idea of the purpose of the content from the first word.
But it’s always good to go back and make sure it’s doing the job it was made for.

So:

• Edit for SEO (keyword, headings, internal links).

• Edit for distribution (what quote would you screenshot on Twitter?).

• Edit for action (what’s the next step you want the reader to take?).

We built Penfriend to automatically analyze SERPs for your keyword and tailor the structure of your content to match what’s already ranking - while still giving you room to add your angle.

Cool, SEO covered. But I still need to check the other boxes.

You’ve got to match the search intent exactly. If the top 5 results are all listicles, your how-to guide isn’t going to make the cut. Know what you’re up against.

Editing is where you give content a job.

Update

AI can make stuff up. It’s a lot better than it used to be. But you’re still putting your name to things, it’s worth checking those things.

Editing means fact-checking:

• Numbers

• Quotes

• Claims

✅ With Penfriend: we flag stats, quotes, and potential hallucinations so you know exactly where to check. You can even run our fact-check mode to get source suggestions.

I like to run a quick regex scan in Google Docs (\d+) to hunt down every number in the piece. It’s nerdy. But it works.

Use tools. Don’t trust the machine.

I have a whole series of things I use to fact check content in the full article if you want the whole toolkit.

Relatable

This is the hardest one. And arguable the most important.

This is where you add you.

Stories, analogies, personal opinions. You’ve done the thing - say that you have.

Google’s Helpful Content update wants first-hand experience. So do readers.

The problem isn’t that people don’t have stories. It’s that they haven’t pulled them out of their heads.

Shift from:

• "You could do this..." To:

• "We did this. Here's how it went."

Strengthen

Reading is just one way people consume.

So:

• Break up the walls of text.

• Add visuals, embeds, quotes.

• Highlight key ideas with bullets and callouts.

When you use Penfriend every article is written section by section, so you naturally get breaks, rhythm, and skimmability built in. Plus, our layout prompts show you exactly where to add media for impact.

Zoom your doc out to 30%. You’ll spot the intimidating blocks instantly. Break 'em up. Space is your friend.

People will skim a whole block. You need to earn the long read by offering an effortless short one.

Your blog isn’t a book. It’s a billboard. Make it readable at a glance.

There’s a full blog on this if you want the deep dive (with regex, sources, and all). But here’s the short version:

If you’re already using Penfriend - you’ve got the best first draft on the internet. Now it’s your turn to make it yours.

See you tomorrow. For the last time???

✌️ Tim "The only drafts I like is chess" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S.  I typed this whole thing very quickly and probably left in a typo. If you find it, congrats - you're now Editor-in-Chief. Your sash is in the mail.

P.P.S. I will be refreshing my editing blog in the coming weeks. It pains me to not have the 2025 version on there.

And as such, I want you wonderful people in my blog. Give me your tips, tricks, mistakes, lessons etc. You’ll get a link. Reply to the email, DM me on LinkedIn. Send it in the post?

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Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.