Tag: writing
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32 notes on AI & writing – “AI is better than most humans at producing prose. In a couple years, it will be better than most “professional writers” as well. Most text is not creative. Emails, policy papers, reported news. It does not desire to surprise or delight. It aims to convey ideas and information…
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🤖 ChatGPT’s Love Affair with the Em Dash Sparks a Punctuation Panic
This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: With the Em Dash, A.I. Embraces a Fading Tradition AI’s persistent use of the em dash has triggered a minor cultural freakout online, with many insisting it’s a “tell” that instantly reveals machine-generated text. Yet the dash is a centuries-old punctuation mark beloved by novelists and grammarians,…
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“Executize this” -> “write this for someone who doesn’t care about the topic but needs to deal with it for their job.”
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How to use AI to write conference talk abstracts, good ones
“GenAI can help you write talk proposals, but if you use it without injecting your own curiosity and humanness, reviewers can tell. Here’s the process I use to shape real, human abstracts that reflect my curiosity and experience. I developed this process for technical talks, but it adapts well to other formats too.” From Whitney.
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Don’t kill your darlings, put them in the dead pool
Here is some (book) writing pedantry for business book writing. Of course, the way to write anything is to “just start writing.” For some people, this works. For most, the question is, “yes, but how ‘just start writing’?” That is, how do you start with a blank screen/blank sheet of paper? For me, I start…
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a word to my students – Copy and paste from AI only hurts the student. The rest of is should just worry about our own, ongoing shit-storms. // However, outside of education, when the point is to communicate and get shit done, I say go crazy with “chatbots.” They are probably better, more effective business…
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1989: Japan Buys A Used President – This is an incredible piece of writing just one sample: “It is sad and disturbing to witness with what insouciance he now sells the stature which his country afforded him to any country which can afford him. It demeans us all to see him so available, so eager…
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On the pleasure of reading private notebooks – Diaries (“journals”) and notebooks are the best, I love them as well. // “I think this is because our genuine thoughts (and interests) are more detailed and alive than the simulations we have of what we should say (or be interested in). When we think no one…
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Three Reasons to Write More in an Age When Writing Means Less. – Write (and publish in the web) oto make sure you are known and have a legacy in the LLMs. Also, contribute to the future of knowledge (slight eyeroll there). // Oh, also because writing it the best way to think.
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28 slightly rude notes on writing – by Adam Mastroianni – ”Somehow, whenever I finish a draft, my first few paragraphs almost always contain ideas that were necessary for writing the rest of the piece, but that aren’t necessary for understanding it.” // Lower down, that first part to delete is called “the windup.” I…
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3 prompts for better knowledge worker docs –
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Issues for His Prose Style – Picking the right noun as a deep cut mechanic, to show authenticity, and build up a mythos of yourself, and for yourself. // Hemingway’s letters.
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How to write better conclusions
Use the last paragraph for something fun Watching the video is more fun, but here’s he transcript you can’t be bothered: The way you learn to write a conclusion to an essay or a paper or whatever kind of text you’re writing in school: just totally forget that. What you want to do when you…
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Don’t Click Here – I’ve gone go back and forth on this over the decades. Like every other good little HTML’er in the 90s, I would link the words in a sentence that indicated what the link went to. I kept doing this in the 2000s. But then in the 2010’s when we started treating…
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Writing Examples – Good for itself, and probably good for instructing The AI.
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Epic corporate jargon alternatives – Poetic alternatives to business bullshit jargon.
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Content Editing: How To Handle Major Rewrites – Pretty detailed guide to editing (corporate) content that isn’t good enough.
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Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’ – Project versus product for happiness. Also, living life by waste book/commonplace book – something I certainly can appreciate. (Bit it a ringer it being Helen Garner, but don’t let that stop you.)
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What they don’t tell you about conference MC script writing
A quick one today, no time to compile the links and stuff Writing good MC scripts for the keynote sessions I’ve been writing the MC script for our upcoming SpringOne conference. I was supposed to go be one of the MCs but had to cancel. It would have been awesome to know both sides of…
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