I used to hand things in and hope for the best. Not because I didn't care. I cared too much to look at it again.
There can a particular kind of dread that comes with re-reading your own work. You stop seeing the words. Potentially you miss aspects of the criteria.
AI can be a great tool when used in moderation.
You paste in the marking criteria. You paste in your draft. You ask it whether one matches the other. It tells you. Not rudely. Not kindly either. Just plainly, the way someone tells you there's something in your teeth. Useful. Slightly uncomfortable.
It doesn't get attached to your favourite paragraph. It doesn't care that you spent forty minutes on the opening line. It reads the brief and it reads your work and it tells you where the gap is. There's something almost relieving about that.
I think a lot of us write for ourselves first. We answer the question we wished they'd asked. AI has no interest in that. It keeps pulling you back. The brief says this. You've written that. They aren't the same thing.
It's not doing the work for you. That's the part people get wrong. It's doing the part you were always too close to do well, the cold read. The outside eye. The person who has no feelings about your draft and a very clear memory of what was actually asked.
You still have to write it. You still have to mean it.
But when you're done, it's worth asking something that doesn't care either way.
