Comment by YuechenLi
16 hours ago
A lot of time I'm not very confident in what I wrote because I have a tendency to ramble and not get to the point quickly. Reading helps, but it's more about style, doesn't help me express myself more eloquently at all.
Another thing is that I find myself using AI-isms in daily conversations more and more the more I use them to help me code. "Load-baaring" and "not X but Y" are phrases that I actively have to catch myself to avoid using now.
Your environment has a huge influence on your language, which is why the advice for anyone writing given here (read, read a lot) is not only sensible but indispensable.
LLM tropes are one thing, but before those came along you could easily see how someone working in a corporate office would pick up jargon there even if they loath it. Here on HN you can observe certain phrases and words which seem to be part of what some IT professionals use — like the horridly angular orthogonal used figuratively.
Reading prose written by writers who live outside of such bubbles (or who simply have a good editor in addition to their own filtering) is an antidote to that.
Working on stylistic issues is a conscious self improvement thing, but you leverage your many hours of reading when you're tackling that. Reading a lot means you unconsciously get good at judging which prose works well and which grates.
I suggest finding an author whose style you like; in my case, it was Isabel Allende. Read their work deeply, effectively taking a bath in their words. Don't stop short of full immersion. Then, write using their style. Reflect on your feeling of discomfort when you experience how their writing style differs from yours.
Then do the same deep dive for a different author. I may have made a mistake with my current choice, Jill Lepore. I can't tell whether it's her writing style or what she writes about, but it is definitely chewy.
Writing, programming, or drawing is fundamentally training on somebody else's work. Accept it, get better at it, and then move on.
Read their work deeply, effectively taking a bath in their words. Don't stop short of full immersion.
Just wanted to compliment your writing. Though only a short comment, it painted a vivid picture in my mind.
Rambling is OK as long as you can treat the result as a draft that you can refine. I've often written emails that were three paragraphs in the first draft and 5 lines after deliberate revision. And the shorter revision was always much better.
Rambling is often an effective writing technique. Go ahead, ramble... then go back later, figure out where in the writing you stopped rambling and actually hit your stride, and delete all the rambling that came before that point.
Rambling before getting to the point could be your signature style if you do it well.
Almost no body does rambling well.
In journalism it’s called “burying the lede” and is the most obvious sign of a poor writing, IMHO.