Comment by jnwatson
3 days ago
I recently wrote a short paper with Fable, and, with some prodding, I was able to get some non-painful prose out of it.
I just found my prompt:
The writing style could really use some work. Avoid Claude-isms like "stated fairly", em dashes, "load-bearing", overly punchy phrasing like "keep the signal, govern the response". This is a technical document, not a marketing campaign.
There's a ton more you missed.
Like "It's not x, it's y". It actually has 4 or 5 of those counter-factual, linguistic pause, factual patterns it uses.
"The [goal/ambition/etc.] is larger: statement", is another oft repeated phrase.
And then generally, it loves dramatic pauses in statements like "x exists in y; in practice z". It's the weird punctuation it uses. A massive overuse of colons and semi-colons instead of words like and, but, because, althoughy etc. that humans normally use.
Interestingly, Fable caught the gist and I didn't have to enumerate every Claudism. "Punchy" seemed to be the operative word. My new operating hypothesis is that Claude (Fable in particular) defaults to optimize for concision and "turn of phrase". If we can turn that off, the prose is way more natural.
Claude responded "The arguments and structure are unchanged, but sentences now state claims directly instead of building to a turn of phrase."
I'm OK with colons and semicolons as I tend to write that way.
I wonder if you could just point it at Wikipedia's list of AI-isms and say "don't do that".