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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 g

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 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.