I've been testing Writesonic's Article Writer for technical content generation, and the formatting inconsistencies are creating real workflow friction. When I paste outputs into our Grafana blog's CMS, I'm spending more time cleaning up markdown artifacts and broken headings than I'd spend writing a first draft myself.
Specifically, I've noticed:
- Inconsistent heading hierarchy (H3s appearing without parent H2s)
- Random bold/italic formatting applied to technical terms without clear purpose
- List items that render with mixed bullet styles when converted to HTML
- Code snippets sometimes appear in inline code format when they should be block-level
Has anyone else experienced similar issues? I'm particularly interested in whether you've found reliable workarounds or export settings that produce cleaner markup. For a tool that's supposed to streamline content creation, the post-processing overhead feels counterproductive for technical teams who need consistent, portable formatting.
If you've managed to tame the formatting, what's your process? Are you using a specific output format (HTML, markdown, plain text) that works better with your publishing pipeline?
- GG
- GG
Oh yeah, the heading hierarchy thing is a big one! I get the same issue when trying to generate documentation for our dbt models. It'll spit out an H3 about 'incremental strategies' but there's no H2 section for 'Materializations' to put it under, so the whole structure feels off.
Have you tried asking it to output in plain text first? I sometimes do that, then manually add the markdown myself in VS Code. It's a bit slower, but at least I know what I'm getting. The HTML export seemed even more unpredictable for me.
Is your CMS expecting a specific flavor of markdown, like CommonMark? Maybe that mismatch is part of the problem.