Comment by chromacity

> Always judge an author by the length of their text.

Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.

Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.

So it’s really about the content; not the metrics.

My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.

She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.

French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.

As the saying goes: “If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter”

So many books that could've been an article. I try to save myself time by checking Goodreads but it's not always clear as I'm more critical than the average person. Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off. Appreciate that lately new books are sometimes featured in pubs with an excerpt.

What you say makes no sense by your own logic. 200 words can be wonderfully filled with wisdom or devoid of insight depending how much work and experience went into those words. So it is not appropriate to judge an author by the length of their text. You need length/wisdom but you can’t objectively or quickly determine the denominator.

So, not in fact the length of the text, which is constant at 200 pages.

Good writing and good communication is also about keeping the reader engaged and concentrating, however. Even in business writing - for example, how-tos or intranet pages, altering sentence length, using rhetorical questions can be helpful. I'm concerned that tools like this will tend to stamp out useful writing conventions, that were picked up by LLMs precisely because they were useful.

The result? Increasingly homogeneous, boring text.

This is something I've been working on in my own professional writing for years. I used to write very long emails, thinking I was providing insight and detail, but nobody would even bother reading them because it was such a chore.

I consider more than three paragraphs and more than two sentences per paragraph a "writing smell." It's relatively easy now, especially when I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness.

I try to limit my emails to one, clear, strong point—usually just factual statements—in the active voice, eschewing adverbs as much as possible. The emails almost write themselves now, because there isn't much choice on what to write anymore.

Check out the books by Rudolf Flesch. Old school, but ever more applicable. Also, Bugs in writing, by Lyn Dupree.

I recommend <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM>, Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively.

I've heard the story of the time e-mail was new and one secretary's job was to print out her boss's emails, he'd write a reply below by hand, and she'd type it back in and send it.

In other words, just as they did in "Rob Roy": "My factor will contact Your Grace's factor..."

In uni, maybe. But my experience in middle/high school was that hitting the minimum word count was much more important than actually good writing.

Ask your team to make their documentation at least 30% shorter just before sending. I don’t remember where I first I read this advice for writing code, but it’s been part of my workflow for several years. It’s an arbitrary number, but it forces you think how to make things simpler. I apply the same principle when packing for travel or hiking.

For better or for worse my team has standardized on using Miro for technical designs and diagrams. It's a lot easier to visualize the system in a diagram than it is to talk about it in prose.

I think it's important to choose the right medium for communication though. Some things just need to be written out concisely.

I can condense that and improve clarity simply by s/oo/o/

No. I've been using that construct long before LLMs and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It allows you to succinctly state the position you're disagreeing with before putting forward another hypothesis. LLMs overuse it for needless emphasis, with the negative example usually reduced to a single word.

Anyone over the age of 25 actually developed their writing style before ChatGPT came about. Getting all uppity about these surface-level LLM ‘tropes’ is just stupid. I am thankfully yet to run into a situation where someone with this attitude is actually in a position to be able to negatively affect my life. I’m sure that there’s a correlation. Take the “ew, em-dash” stuff back to Twitter.

This doesn't apply here - I don't think? The article claims X; so it is surely no sin for the post rebutting it to straight up state that X is, in fact, not the case.

The LLM tic, by contrast, has a noticeable tendency to be deployed even when X has never been previously mentioned. It is a valid rhetorical technique, and I assume that's why the LLMs have picked up on it - but it has to be deployed judiciously. Which is something LLMs appear absolutely incapable of doing. And that is why people notice it, and think it sucks.

Just because LLMs overuse it doesn't mean it doesn't have its place.

The way the OP used the 'not X, but Y' pattern, the 'X' and 'Y' are two clear, specific, and (most importantly) distinct things, as opposed to stereotypical LLM usage where they're vague characterizations or metaphors. And there's a reason to emphasize that it's not X, because the Slop Cop website implicitly suggests that it is X.

Nonsense. It's a common construction that LLMs didn't exactly invent. I don't think their usage evokes LLM writing at all (not short and punchy enough).