Neurodiverse Leader: Working Differently series: AI in Writing

Introducing our new series by City Hive co-CEO Bev Shah who shares her experience with neurodiversity in different workplace scenarios. This week the focus is on writing….

I’ve known I’m neurodiverse since my early teens, and I’ve spent years adapting to environments that don’t always align with how I think and work.

Masking isn’t occasional - it’s constant.

None of this has stopped me being effective. If anything, it’s made me more aware of how I work, and more deliberate in how I approach things. I understand that much better now - but I’m still learning what works.

Neurodiverse Leader: Working Differently is a series based on real situations I navigate in my day-to-day role - presenting, networking, meetings and decision-making.

It explores where standard ways of working don’t always fit, what that feels like in practice, and the adaptations I’ve developed to work effectively.

This isn’t about theory or awareness. It’s about how the job actually gets done - just in a different way.

Others may recognise similar experiences, or approach them differently - this is simply how I’ve learned to navigate them.

Translating ideas into words 

I am heavily dyslexic.

Writing has never been easy for me, despite spending most of my career in environments where strong written communication is expected.

The strange thing is that the ideas are usually there very quickly. The analysis is there. The patterns, the connections, the nuance and the strategic thinking are often already fully formed in my head.

But translating that into written form can feel incredibly difficult.

I sometimes describe it as having a sonnet in my head that comes out on the page as “the cat sat on the mat”.

The gap has never been the thinking. It has been the translation.

Educational systems heavily reward strong written expression. From an early age, writing fluency, structure and grammar become closely associated with achievement and success.

What’s not visible

People who are naturally strong writers often don’t realise how much of an advantage that can be professionally, because the mechanics of writing happen relatively effortlessly.

Grammar, sentence structure, sequencing and flow are all happening at the same time, often without conscious effort.

For me, writing has always been much more cognitively expensive.

It can take me a long time to structure thoughts coherently. Spelling and grammar are difficult. I often know roughly what I want to communicate but struggle to get it into the right order. My thinking moves quickly and associatively, and the process of slowing that down into structured written form can feel frustrating and exhausting.

Even in meetings, my notes rarely look conventional. They are often fragments, arrows, diagrams and disconnected thoughts rather than neat linear records of what was said.

I used to hide my notebook because I assumed everyone else’s notes looked more coherent than mine.

Verbally, I am very strong. I process quickly, recognise patterns easily, and think deeply about nuance and context. But historically, there has often been a disconnect between the quality of the thinking and the ease with which I could express it in writing.

That disconnect is not always obvious to other people, particularly when verbal communication comes much more naturally. It can also be difficult to explain.

What happens when I follow the expected approach

For years, I tried to improve my writing by forcing myself into more traditional processes.

I rewrote things repeatedly. I spent huge amounts of time editing. I tried to perfect structure before getting ideas down. I focused heavily on spelling and grammar because I was worried about how mistakes would be perceived.

The result was usually frustration and slowdown.

My thoughts would become tangled. The process of writing would interrupt the actual thinking. Sometimes I would avoid writing altogether because it felt disproportionately difficult compared with the value of the output.

Looking back, I think I confused friction with lack of fit.

What I do instead

I now use AI heavily in writing.

Not because the ideas are not mine, but because it helps close the gap between how quickly I think and how difficult I have historically found written expression.

The thinking is mine. The analysis, judgement and nuance are mine.

What AI helps with is translation.

I do sometimes feel uncomfortable admitting how heavily I use AI in writing, because there is still a perception in some circles that using it is somehow “cheating”.

I think part of that comes from the fact that people who are naturally strong writers do not always see writing fluency as a particular advantage, because for them many of the mechanics happen instinctively.

For me, the experience is very different. AI is not replacing the thinking. It is helping me bridge the gap between thought and written expression.

It helps me structure ideas, shape language, reduce repetition, improve clarity and take unnecessary emotional heat out of communication that might otherwise appear sharper or less polished than intended.

It has also dramatically increased my ability to participate. I can produce documents, reports and written communication at a speed and quality that would previously have taken me significantly longer or felt inaccessible altogether.

That does not mean the process becomes effortless.

Good AI-assisted writing still requires judgement, critical thinking and oversight. In many ways, I think the ability to work effectively with AI depends heavily on synthesis, reasoning and knowing what you are trying to say in the first place.

I still find version management difficult. I still get frustrated when edits create unnecessary rewrites or when changes are made that optimise wording without improving meaning. I still need to check everything carefully.

But the cognitive burden is fundamentally different.

For the first time, the process feels more aligned with how I think.

How to work out what works for you

This isn’t just about neurodiversity. Different people think, process and communicate differently, and writing is not experienced equally by everyone.

A few questions that can help:

• Is the difficulty in my thinking, or in translating the thinking into written form?

• When do I feel most articulate - verbally or in writing?

• Which parts of writing feel cognitively heavy for me: structure, sequencing, grammar, editing or clarity?

• Am I judging myself through the ease with which I can produce polished writing?

The aim is not to lower standards or avoid clear communication. It is to understand how you communicate most effectively and what support or structure allows that to happen.

What this means for leadership

Clear writing is a real skill. Strong writers are able to create clarity, structure and nuance in ways that are genuinely valuable.

But I do think educational and professional systems have historically over-indexed on written fluency as a marker of capability.

My first role in the City came through an internship programme at an investment bank. My cover letter contained spelling and grammar mistakes.

At the time, a human still read it.

The mistakes either were not spotted or were not treated as disqualifying, and I was given the opportunity to interview instead. My verbal communication and thinking got me into the role, and that opportunity shaped the rest of my career.

I sometimes wonder whether I would get through the same process today.

Increasingly automated recruitment systems and heavily filtered application processes may remove the opportunity for certain kinds of thinkers to ever reach the stage where their strengths become visible.

That matters, particularly if organisations genuinely care about cognitive diversity.

If we over-index on written fluency, we risk overlooking people whose thinking is strong but whose route to expression is different.

AI will not replace good thinking, judgement or communication.

But I do think it changes access.

And if organisations want more cognitive diversity, they may increasingly need to separate the quality of someone’s ideas from the mechanics of how easily they can express them in writing.

The shift

For a long time, I thought the difficulty sat in the writing itself.

Now I think the challenge was the amount of cognitive translation required to get what was in my head into a form that matched how the world expected it to appear on the page.

The ideas were never missing.

The challenge was getting them out.