Anastasiya Golovatenko, Director at Sherpa Communications Not long ago, a CEO came to me frustrated. He said he had written what he believed was a strong opinion piece, a thoughtful and timely one in fact, yet wasn’t able to successfully get it published.
As the GCC landscape gets more competitive, it is natural that business leaders want to be seen and heard. As a strategy, most are turning to thought leadership. This has made publishing opinion pieces one of the most powerful and widely used communication strategies. Newsrooms and publications across the region now receive more submissions than ever before.
Yet despite this surge, only a small fraction of these articles makes it to publication, thus leaving many leaders wondering, ‘Why was my piece rejected?’.
In most cases, rejection has nothing to do with the pitch. What publications are noticing is a growing absence of genuine perspective in the pieces being submitted. Many articles arrive sounding too promotional or being overstructured and carry the same overly cautious corporate tone. It lacks the one element editors value most – a market perspective, a bigger bird’s view on the problem or challenge faced by industry, with expert advice on potential solutions.
AI approaches writing as a formulaic combination of the work that it models after, essentially a summary/amalgamation of all the content on the same subject. For instance, instead of offering a pain point and way forward or a solution-driven perspective, many pieces read like marketing material presented as expert insight. They lack a true expert viewpoint and the bigger-picture element. This overuse has recently led to a wave of writing styles that sound sophisticated but lack depth.
An example of this is writing like: In today’s fast-paced educational landscape, technology is playing a central role in shaping how students learn and how teachers teach. While digital tools offer unprecedented access to knowledge and personalized learning, they also bring challenges that require careful implementation. Ultimately, thoughtful integration is key to creating meaningful educational experiences.
The same idea becomes far more compelling when grounded in insight, linked to : In a recent pilot, over XX students scored X to X% higher in tech-driven, adaptive lessons, showing how classroom technology that adjusts to each student’s pace and needs can significantly improve test results. According to XX study or in alignment with the UAE XX initiative, this development is aimed at …
Thousands of books are published every year on similar themes like leadership, innovation or human behaviour. Shakespeare wrote about love, power, ambition, and conflict, topics explored by countless others, but his voice is unmistakable. In modern times, Malcolm Gladwell and Yuval Noah Harari are celebrated for their unique perspectives on well-worn subjects.
When such content is also shaped using AI, depth can be lost behind more general statements. AI is great for proofreading and similar tasks, but it is important for experts to share their valuable insights when developing opinion pieces. It speeds up tasks that once took hours. But when AI becomes the primary author of an opinion piece, it raises an important question: “If the words are not shaped by the expert’s own thinking or voice, can it still be called an opinion? And can it truly be considered thought leadership?” Editors want to understand how a leader thinks, more than how well a tool can summarise a subject. For more lifestyle-focused publications, a more conversational tone, light humour, and hints of the author’s personality can also work well, but in this market, tech, business, and national outlets still tend to prefer a more traditional, structured style.
For business writing to regain its value, it must return to its original purpose of offering insights of an author, and it requires allowing personality back into the work.
By Anastasiya Golovatenko, Director at Sherpa Communications.
