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by mtlynch 1181 days ago
IMHO, GPT didn't do a particularly good rewrite.

The original first sentence is overly long and complex, and so is GPT's. The original obscures the meaning behind passive voice, and GPT added even more passive voice ("should be based on your intended use").

I'll give credit to GPT for eliminating the ambiguity around "discuss these," but the rest of the changes don't improve the clarity much for me.

I appreciate that GPT's feedback is free and instant, but you can make deeper fixes to your writing with a one-time exercise that will probably take 10-20 hours and cost a few hundred dollars. Consider hiring a freelance editor to review your work and identify anti-patterns in your writing. I did this a few years ago, and it substantially improved my writing.[0]

The anti-patterns I notice in this snippet:

* Omission of actors for verbs ("when deploying into the enterprise" - who's deploying?)

* Overloading sentences with complexity (first sentence is very long and has complex structure, complex wording)

* Packing together verbs in a confusing way ("comes to deciding how you structure", "depend on how you plan to use")

* Ambiguous pronouns ("which ones", "discuss these")

[0] https://mtlynch.io/editor/