Comment by tombert
12 days ago
Tangential, but I remember when I was studying for the ACT, there was something in one of the practice books that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "Good writing is clear and easy to understand. It's about communication, make sure you communicate".
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
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.
> I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness.
Ok, Mr. Milchick.
Milchik's problem was that he worshipped--quite literally--the company. I do this for my own gain. I started getting much more of what I wanted out of work and other formal relationships (my kids' teachers, my doctors, etc) when I got honest with how I was communicating and how I was being perceived and changed my habits to suit.
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.