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by riwsky 1282 days ago
Read “On Writing Well”, by William Zinsser. Journalism schools often assign it to first-years. I speak English natively, and have no trouble with grammar. It still made me better at my job.

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Would not be interested in paying for the app. Current models summarize well, and can rewrite for tone too. But clear technical communication requires understanding the underlying logic, which LLMs haven’t quite cracked yet.

1 comments

This should absolutely be the first stop for anyone who wants to improve their writing. Just don't get bogged down in the more narrowly-focused chapters, like Chapter 13: Writing About Places: The Travel Article.

Another helpful book is A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston. It focuses more on the organization of your thoughts before you start writing. When writing about more complex topics, I frequently find myself discovering what I want to say as I'm writing, which makes for a lot of re-organizing and re-writing and wasted time. By slapping together an outline of what I want to write before I get started, I can identify what I want to say--and the optimal order in which to say it--before putting pen to paper.