3 ms·
> What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know. People are terrible at writing. Near universally bad. Even good writers have draft
by IanCal 26d ago
> What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know.
People are terrible at writing. Near universally bad. Even good writers have drafts and editors.
There is a constant refrain here that somehow short messages are more valuable than longer ones. But that assumes it's understandable. Lots of short content is, frankly, awful because the writer cannot put themselves in the position of the reader and explain all the things around the point they're making that the reader really should be told.
You can view writing as translation. From your language to a language your audience speaks. At that level is it so odd if the word count differs from one side to the other?
- strix_varius 26d agoTo turn bad short writing into good long writing you must necessarily change the content of the writing, not just the shape.
- pastel8739 26d agoBut this is the same with coding. The reason that AI can write code from a description that is shorter than the output is in large part because it makes decisions about the behavior that were unspecified in your prompt. We accept this for coding apparently, I guess because those decisions are often unimportant. We might accept it for writing too. I hope not.
- xarope 26d agowasn't it thoreau who said "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short" personally, I think there's a time and place for short versus long, just like there's a time and place for a 45mins TV episode versus a 2 hour marathon movie.
- IanCal 26d agoNot necessarily. Poorly worded, ambiguous, confusingly ordered writing can be massively improved without changing the core content. Better setups and explanations can be longer without changing the message or meaning. Look at it the other way, could you take a good longer message you’ve written and make it shorter and less readable for your audience while still making sense to you and containing the key points?