How I Used Ai to Write My First Newsletter

This week I had the privilege of testing out Summari’s artificial intelligence tool for drafting newsletters.

This week I had the privilege of testing out Summari’s artificial intelligence tool for drafting newsletters.

Image generated by Craiyon Ai (used with permission)

Summari is already a great tool for getting summaries of articles you are not sure you want to read.

The information flow today is like 20 firehoses tied together. I’m sure most of the people reading this have a long list of articles they want to read, but never will… and that is probably okay most of the time. But what if you miss out on the one hidden gem that changes your life forever? FOMO on the rise!

Summari allows you to get a summary of any article before committing to a full read. If that’s enough, you move on. If you want more, go read the entire article.

Summari is looking at including a newsletter function in its business plan, allow business and creators to easily summarize key articles for their newsletter. Still in private beta, I had time to test it out this week.

Here is how it went.

Collating relevant articles

Since this is an experiment, I simply looked around for articles about Ai in higher education, a topic I’m interested in, and added them to Summari with their browser plug-in.

Then, I looked through all my summaries and grouped any others that might be relevant.

I chose 5 articles about Ai in higher education, and added them to the newsletter tool.

Screenshot of Summari’s inbox page (used wth permsion)

Creating blocks of content

One of the biggest changes in writing is a focus on content blocks.

Sure, these blocks can be paragraphs, but they can also be sentences, images, videos… or summaries. Summari helpfully organizes all the articles as a list of blocks with bulleted items and a small space for a description. You can move these around as you think through your newsletter.

So I looked at the blocks and determined a logical order, mostly starting with more general articles to more specific.

Screenshot of Summari create page (used with permission)

Sculpting for writers

Then, I “sculpted” the Ai-generated text.

I whittled down the summaries by deleting unnecessary parts of the summary and reworked each block of content into a readable summary for my specific audience — teachers. I don’t ever just take Ai-generated text on its own… I always need to sculpt it in this way. That’s what makes it my text.

I added an introduction to the description box for my specific audience and purpose.

Screenshot of Summari Create Page (used with permission)

Sharing to the world

I can now share a link directly to this Summari page, but I also cut and paste the text into Medium to share with my readers.

This was a bit cumbersome, since the links did not transfer in the Markdown cut and paste. You can also export to Mailchimp, Pardot, Hubspot, and Wordpress … none of which I actually use. I did cut and paste the text from Medium into two newsletter systems that I’ve been looking into.

• See my newsletter in Hey, World, a very simple newsletter function in Hey email.

• See my letter in Revue, a newsletter system integrated with Twitter.

Cutting and pasting from Medium worked pretty well, but I did notice that Revue functions as content blocks as well and posts directly to Medium. It would be interesting to see something like this with Summari.

How I can use Summari better

Having done this once now, I could definitely make better use of Summari for next time.

I mostly picked random articles indiscriminately with varying lengths. Some sites probably work better than others, so I would be more careful about what articles to pick.

I also would check the summaries more thoroughly. I skimmed the entire articles to see what the Ai picked out. While many of the items were useful, there was a lot missing. You can’t totally trust Ai.

That said, this has a lot of potential for writers who want to curate information quickly for their audiences.

Sculpting is my key takeaway

Just like any other Ai tool, it will not write your newsletter. The Ai does not know about your purpose and audience… but it can make the task of summarizing and arranging material easier.

You will still need to “sculpt” the newsletter for your specific rhetorical purpose.

See the full newsletter on Medium below.

5 Articles To Get Teachers Thinking about Ai in Education
Ai technology is on the rise. There is no avoiding it for educators.lancecummings.medium.com

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