[edna314]

Seems like one should write how the people who read your text would expect you to write. This is my main problem with writing, since I have a very hard time to figure out what people expect. I also read a lot of books about writing, but none really helped. They always use these very abstract concepts which if you apply them blindly will also lead to an incomprehensible text anyways. What helped a lot was to just take a similar text which seemingly fulfills expectations, and, almost short of plagiarism, just exchange the messages which are conveyed. This is where AI could help a lot, because I would think that it should be able to exactly this task, if you provide it the message you would like to write up. Anyways, I don’t know anybody (at least in science) who likes writing and I really hope that there will be a more practical solution than spending hours and hours of refining a text in the future. This time could better be spent on research.

[petemir]

Have you tried Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style"? Although there is indeed a chapter (ch.4) that deals with some difficult to apply concepts (i.e. adding unnecessary friction at the moment of writing), the other chapters delve into graspable topics with lots of examples that clearly explain what works and doesn't.

[edna314]

No, I haven’t read this one, maybe it’s worth a try. The issue is, even when you are at a stage where you realize what works and what doesn’t, you still wouldn’t know what to write exactly. The only option you have is to write up sentences, then check whether you made a mistake and, if so, write up a different sentence and reiterate. I would need a book which would tell me how to construct sentences which are in accordance with all the rules and concepts. But, it doesn’t seem to be possible to write such a book, since writing really is an art. After all, there also isn’t any book which teaches you how to paint like Da Vinci, but only those which tell you which rules you can apply to his paintings.