Five years ago, on May 3, 2021, I published my first blog post. Now I have Claude AI I was asked to analyze my blog. Not for strategic reasons, but because it was what came to mind to try out this tool. Simply out of curiosity. Generally, an exciting question: How do others perceive my writing? What becomes clear in it? And is there any style that I accidentally share with someone? What emerged from this touched me more than I had expected.

What is Claude anyway?

Claude is an AI assistant from Anthropic. It's similar to ChatGPT, but with a slightly different focus. Speed isn't as important as deeper thinking.

I learned about the tool through Blog-Profi Judith Sympatexter, when the idea came up in their blog community that we actually no longer want to support ChatGPT for political reasons.

So, no sooner said than done: I tried Claude. I simply pointed it to my blog and asked it to analyze my writing style and compare it to well-known authors. Claude then read several of my articles – recent and older – and produced an analysis that I hadn't expected.

2. The analysis itself

Claude identified three writing modes that run through my blog: a personal-reflective one, an analytical-systemic one, and an autobiographical-courageous one. What struck me about it: That's right. I experience my writing exactly like that myself, depending on the topic, depending on my energy, depending on how much I'm willing to show at the moment.

As the epitome of current style, Claude landed at Brené Brown, Pierre Bourdieu and Maggie Nelson:

• 89% Brené Brown: for the connection of vulnerability and universal observation

• 78% Pierre Bourdieu: for translating sociology into human language

• 63% Maggie Nelson: for writing about the body and identity as a source of knowledge

All of this flattered me, surprised me, and at the same time, I immediately found these comparisons very fitting. My thinking is and has always been geared towards multidimensionality: What is happening within me? What is happening with me and others? What are the group effects? What are the system effects? What influences what? How does this play out over time? What is changeable and in what way?

And of course, I'm a sociologist, so Bourdieu wouldn't really be surprised by that. So it was surprising because it was so fitting. But that wasn't what really impressed me about that external analysis.

3. What the analysis says about my development

Claude also read older articles at my request, going back to my very first post from 2021. In doing so, something became clear that I knew more or less, but had never seen so clearly before: My writing has changed fundamentally. And specifically, not just any way, but precisely corresponding to the development I've gone through in my life.

In 2021, in my published articles, I was "the expert" who explained. Factual, detached, correct. Personal matters? Hardly. The „I" voice? Almost non-existent. What Claude described as "explanation mode" was also a defense mechanism at the time when I started blogging, even if I wouldn't have phrased it that way back then. More on this in the next section, section 4.

Then, step by step, a relaxation. First personal insights, direct address to the readers. Phases in which I published articles, phases in which I didn't write articles. Then, a real turning point came in the fall of 2024: I stopped explaining and started telling.

And Claude discovered something that the AI described as a „paradoxical pattern": The less I explain, the more impact is created. The more I trust the reader and myself, the stronger the writing becomes.

Here are the screenshots of the analysis results from Claude.

What's exciting is that the characteristics of language use – personality, intellectual depth, linguistic precision – haven't replaced each other, nor has one diminished over time. No. Quite the opposite. Over time, according to this analysis, I've simply enhanced all the characteristics. I'd say my articles just became denser. Seemingly acquired more substance.

4. What's behind it

I have been on a journey for years. A journey to show myself. To become visible. That sounds simple, but it isn't – at least not if you've spent a long time learning to adapt, to be as correct as possible, to offer as little surface for attack as possible. And also not if diagnoses and experiences have left you with trauma.

That I started writing again in 2021 was no accident. While I've been writing my whole life, it was mostly for myself. Poems, stories, song lyrics. None of it was ever seen by anyone outside my family. Except maybe a few friends. I couldn't keep up with journaling. But I did write letter books with friends – at one point I actually had 14 pen pals. But for the most part, it was personal correspondence.

In 2021, writing was one of my coping mechanisms for dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from an experience of violence. It was – along with the singing lessons I started at the time – part of my journey to "find my voice again.".

At the end of 2025, at almost 40 years old, I received a diagnosis of ADHD and giftedness, with some autistic traits. Pieces of the puzzle that explain a lot in retrospect – about my thinking, my feeling, my functioning, and especially why I often felt so alien in this world.

These diagnoses accelerated a process that had already been underway for some time. When I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 30, I began to question the way I lived my life even more than I already was. I couldn't answer the question "WHO AM I?" for a long time. But I wanted to answer it. So I started a very personal development journey. And since my PTSD diagnosis, I've been on the path to showing myself with my "WHO AM I?". To become visible. Even if I don't have a final answer to this question. And perhaps never will.

Since then, I've been opening myself up more and more. Even publicly. It honestly surprised me that this is so clearly visible in my blog articles - as a curve, as a timeline, as a stylistic development. And it moved me. Because it shows: writing is not just communication. It is personality. It is courage. It is what happens when you dare to control less.

5. What that means to me

I will continue to write. Even more personally. Even more directly. With even less of a protective structure. Not right away. But I have gathered the courage to let this development run its course. And that is an extreme development in 5 years of blogging, when I consider how much I trembled when I first clicked the „Publish“ button.

And I will - this is a project that is currently taking shape - eventually write an article that describes this path in more concrete terms. The path from the controlled expert to the visible person. With everything that comes with it. Or a book. Or a podcast? Who knows with my hyperactive brain and its 1000 ideas.

For now, the one thing I'm taking away from this little AI exercise is this: it's worthwhile to look at yourself from the outside. Sometimes you then see things that you can't see from the inside – or didn't want to see yet.

Out with it.

To try it yourself:

Claude is accessible for free at claude.ai. Just copy the following prompt, paste your blog's URL, and see what you get. I'm excited to see your results.

Feel free to write them in the comments!

Copy prompt:

I want you to analyze my writing style. To do this, visit my blog: [INSERT YOUR URL HERE]

Read several articles – recent and older. Then analyze:

1. What writing modes do you recognize?
2. Which well-known author(s) does my style resemble, and why?
3. How has my writing style evolved over time?
4. What is my strongest stylistic feature?

Create a visual evaluation with charts that I can view.