3 ms·

I think style is overrated. Yeah if you write commercially, you are a journalist or a copywriter, sure, you need to write in certain style. There’s rules to thi

I think style is overrated. Yeah if you write commercially, you are a journalist or a copywriter, sure, you need to write in certain style. There’s rules to this shit. I think it was Hemingway who said that. Then again, the good ones break the rules. Today even if you don’t use LLM’s following certain formal style you end up sounding like ad copy or wannabe Atlantic -hack. The. You might read some kid on Tumblr writing beautiful prose with typos and errors and all. First of all you should have something to say. I write a blog just to make tutorials for myself on stuff I need to regularly check out. I don’t really care if anyone reads it. I don’t use LLM to make the posts since, well, pride, but also because I learn better when I need to write the stuff down and check my facts several times. I don’t much care if I make a typo or grammar error here and there. If I want to write it as Jeeves from Wodehouse book, fuck it, I will. If you have a story you have something to write about. It doesn’t have to be fiction, it can be a story on how multicast works. And it needs to be your story. Then the words come by themselves and writing is relatively easy. To have a story you have to live and think. LLM’s don’t help in that.

tptacek 8d ago
You can just not copyedit. That's fine. More than fine, lately: rough edges are a signifier of authenticity. If that's the way you want to go, writing raw, I think that can be a good strategy. But if you've generally been doing drafts and want to keep writing like that, if part of your process is going to continue to be refining and sharpening, then I think you should know that we're at a point where automation can accelerate that process for you. You can be getting the same amount of work done with less effort, or allowing yourself to concentrate more on the creative thinking part and less on the tedium. That's the point of the post.
- delis-thumbs-7e 8d ago
  My point was, however, is that it depends on what -- and how -- you write. Style is kind of a pretense. Communication in general is a sort of a mucks game of guessing how to get your point across across the medum, whether that of air, FM-radio, writing, internet, video... In academia, copywriting and so-on we create these patterns we call writing styles to agree on the rules on the game. But honestly, we should use sá lot more fuckin swear words when disproving the fuckin conjectures. Yes I know automation makes things quicker. Sometimes even close to fast. But htere's things you should do slow. Writing and thinking are amongst them. And hey, LLM's can help you here as well. But they should not speed you up, they should slow you down. Why did you say this? WHat is your premise? What is the source of this? KIM by Moonshot is really easy to take a system prompt that makes the models output a biggest asshole editor in the world. It doesn't help me at all, on the contrary, it creates friction. I don't think more speed is what we need at this point of evolution.
  - tptacek 7d ago
    People keep writing about "style", as if I'm asking models "hey, how do you like this, and how could we make it more stylish". That's not at all what I'm asking. I have personally decided, in advance, that one goal I have in writing is improved clarity. The model didn't tell me to do that; Joseph Williams did, decades ago. In the service of that goal, I've written down a proofreading checklist. It includes things like "look for overused words", "eliminate throat-clearing filler like 'it's important to remember that'", "make sure every paragraph has a clear topic sentence", "make sure my real verbs aren't buried inside nouns". Stuff like that. Those are stylistic choices, I suppose, but they're mostly the difference between bad style and a whole universe of good styles. More importantly: they're technical. They're not really judgement calls. The subject of a sentence either is or is not a character taking actions in the story you're trying to tell. It is better, almost always, if the subject is a character, and not accidentally some random piece of the scenery of your point. Models are very good at flagging these things. Humans are too, but they're not as thorough. Many people on this thread have suggested that having a model flag these kinds of issues bleaches out personal style. I don't think that's true; what I think is happening is that they missed the point I'm making, and assumed that I was advocating for having a model make broad subjective calls about my writing.

tptacek 8d ago

You can just not copyedit. That's fine. More than fine, lately: rough edges are a signifier of authenticity. If that's the way you want to go, writing raw, I think that can be a good strategy. But if you've generally been doing drafts and want to keep writing like that, if part of your process is going to continue to be refining and sharpening, then I think you should know that we're at a point where automation can accelerate that process for you. You can be getting the same amount of work done with less effort, or allowing yourself to concentrate more on the creative thinking part and less on the tedium. That's the point of the post.

delis-thumbs-7e 8d ago
My point was, however, is that it depends on what -- and how -- you write. Style is kind of a pretense. Communication in general is a sort of a mucks game of guessing how to get your point across across the medum, whether that of air, FM-radio, writing, internet, video... In academia, copywriting and so-on we create these patterns we call writing styles to agree on the rules on the game. But honestly, we should use sá lot more fuckin swear words when disproving the fuckin conjectures. Yes I know automation makes things quicker. Sometimes even close to fast. But htere's things you should do slow. Writing and thinking are amongst them. And hey, LLM's can help you here as well. But they should not speed you up, they should slow you down. Why did you say this? WHat is your premise? What is the source of this? KIM by Moonshot is really easy to take a system prompt that makes the models output a biggest asshole editor in the world. It doesn't help me at all, on the contrary, it creates friction. I don't think more speed is what we need at this point of evolution.
- tptacek 7d ago
  People keep writing about "style", as if I'm asking models "hey, how do you like this, and how could we make it more stylish". That's not at all what I'm asking. I have personally decided, in advance, that one goal I have in writing is improved clarity. The model didn't tell me to do that; Joseph Williams did, decades ago. In the service of that goal, I've written down a proofreading checklist. It includes things like "look for overused words", "eliminate throat-clearing filler like 'it's important to remember that'", "make sure every paragraph has a clear topic sentence", "make sure my real verbs aren't buried inside nouns". Stuff like that. Those are stylistic choices, I suppose, but they're mostly the difference between bad style and a whole universe of good styles. More importantly: they're technical. They're not really judgement calls. The subject of a sentence either is or is not a character taking actions in the story you're trying to tell. It is better, almost always, if the subject is a character, and not accidentally some random piece of the scenery of your point. Models are very good at flagging these things. Humans are too, but they're not as thorough. Many people on this thread have suggested that having a model flag these kinds of issues bleaches out personal style. I don't think that's true; what I think is happening is that they missed the point I'm making, and assumed that I was advocating for having a model make broad subjective calls about my writing.