Hello · It's Danielle
THE JOURNAL
Essays on the unspoken work of being a person.
The Weekly Letter
A small, honest moment from each week. Delivered quietly on Sundays.
The Archive · Page 2
What I cut
The categories of sentence I delete from my own drafts every time, and why cutting is usually easier than fixing.
A detective, not a teacher
A Nova Scotia study found faculty assessing student work through suspicion rather than evidence. On what that costs, and where the effort should go instead.
The tool is the easy part
As AI tools become commodities, the advantage moves to the inputs you already own: your proprietary data and your house voice.
The gallery and the parking lot
The site of the new Vancouver Art Gallery is a pay parking lot. The old building is showing the best Emily Carr exhibition in twenty years. A note on looking at what's actually there.
Everyone has the same tools now
A study found that using AI to generate ideas compresses variety across a group, while using it to refine your own ideas doesn't. That distinction may be the whole question for brand distinctiveness.
The expensive part is knowing whether it worked
AI made marketing cheaper to produce. The harder, more human work of measuring whether any of it worked, and deciding what to do about the answer, is what's getting scarce.
Writing a book in the gaps
How a book actually gets written around a teaching load. On short sessions, the cost of reloading a chapter, and why the schedule matters more than the mood.
Measuring what you can no longer see
Zero-click search passed two-thirds this year and the IAB has published a first standard for measuring AI visibility. What's left to measure, and what to stop pretending you can.
What people will let AI do, and what they won't
Consumer polling, a Washington Post experiment, and a shift in how ChatGPT cites content all point the same way: as AI gets cheaper at producing marketing, the human parts of the work are what gain value.
The first sentence is a promise
What a first sentence commits you to, why most drafts begin a paragraph too early, and the test I use before I let myself continue.