There are some people that believe that writing is an act of creative expression. In other words, that writing is primarily about the act (and as such, it's a quite selfish activity). Editing destroys the expressive act and must be avoided.
These people's writing is usually incoherent and they are very proud of it. If you've ever read a bad new-age self-help book you've probably encountered writing like this.
Good writers understand that writing is about communication. The initial act of writing (ie, word puke) is worthless. What matters most is a piece of writing's ability to communicate clearly.
This writing is usually pleasant, concise, and clear.
I 'm sure you consider your opinion to be correct, but there is something to writing being an act of creative expression. It's fine for it to be a selfish activity. Diaries are this way, for example, and the negativity you point at other people's hobbies is unfortunate.
There's something to the idea that if the writer is writing with the intention of publishing it, that should be edited. But if you're writing for yourself, and happen to simply keep your writings somewhere public, some other person's desire for you to edit more is a measurement of that other person's feeling of entitlement.
I have about as much desire to read some publisher's edited version of Anne Frank's diary as you appear to have to read the original.
Some argue that her father’s editing was detrimental, that it removed some of her voice and her experience. I think there’s something to editing out the more… problematic parts of a pubescent child’s diary. I would have been mortified if my thoughts of that nature were published, and the censorship allowed the diary to reach a more broad audience in e.g. grade schools. But at the same time, I do understand the wish to see the full, authentic story.
> But the manuscript that Otto Frank pitched to Dutch editors didn’t contain his daughter’s entire diary. Anne herself had begun editing large swathes of her diary with publication in mind after hearing a radio broadcast that called on Dutch people to preserve diaries and other war documents. Otto respected some of those editorial decisions, but overlooked others – for example, he included material about Anne’s crush on annexe dweller Peter van Pels.
> Frank’s candid words on sex didn’t make it into the first published diary, which appeared in English in 1952. Though Anne herself edited her diary with an eye to publication, the book—released eight years after her death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15—contained additional cuts. These were only partially restored in 1986, when a critical edition of her diary was published. Then, in 1995, an even less censored version, including a passage on Frank’s own body previously withheld by her father, was published.
> In response to Minister Bolkestein's appeal on 28 March 1944 on Radio Oranje to keep wartime diaries and letters, Anne Frank decided to rewrite her diary into a novel: "Imagine how interesting it would be if I published a novel of the Secret Annex, from the title alone people would think it was a detective novel."
> Anne rewrote and edited her diary on loose sheets of duplicator paper. On Saturday 20 May 1944, she wrote: "Dear Kitty, At last after much contemplation I have begun my 'the Secret Annex', in my head it is already as finished as it can be, but in reality it will be a lot slower, if it ever gets finished at all." Anne's rewritten version, known as Version B, ends with the diary entry of 29 March 1944.
Thank you, I remember reading this background as well.
There is no 'unedited' version of Anne's diary, as Anne herself intentionally edited and re-edited her work during her time in the Annex. A remarkable young woman. What was published to readers are various versions that have additionally been further somewhat edited by others and in places censored, with the trend being towards gradually less censorship over time.
Actually, unless they are self-published, most "new-age self-help" books are pretty thoughtfully edited. They are persuasive writing, whose goal is to convince you to believe in a framework that is not supported by evidence. Dismissing them for being incoherent is actually a mistake, in that it shows a lack of understanding of their appeal.
Though, I must admit, I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "new-age self-help" books, so I took a guess.
> There are some people that believe that writing is an act of creative expression.
I think "some people" might be underselling it, as evidenced by the borderline innumerable fiction books in existence?
> and as such, it's a quite selfish activity
"quite" seems a bit harsh, surely "writing because you enjoy it" is pretty far down the list of all "selfish" activities? I'd imagine many authors also write because they think others will enjoy their works.
Creativity and concision are not mutually exclusive. Read Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. Their books are concise, almost spartan, clear and pleasant to read, and undeniably creative.
This style of writing is deceptively simple, of course, and devilishly difficult to produce.
You may find that there is a continuum between textbooks and poetry; and that some folks want things that are further over towards the prose and poety side, some of us enjoyed reading Kerouac, we don't care about perfection so much as feeling a piece channel the spirit of the person who wrote it. What is being communicated is not always just the raw parsing of the text but something more, a gestalt of what it meant for the author to be writing that particular kind of thing at that time, in their lives and in history.
"I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special"
- the article, clearly expressing the intent of its own mistakes and contextualizing them in the era of LLM-borne "perfect" text
"I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special"
This is not the beauty of writing. Everyone's writing needs editing. The "raw unedited emotions" are not something anyone wants to read, and this article is no exception.
The author tells us that English is their fourth language, which is certainly impressive. However their writing is messy and poorly constructed. It's difficult to read, and not at all enjoyable. The choice is not between doggerel like this, and LLM empty perfection.
I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).
I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing himself without communicating anything valuable and well produced. It's kind of like people who enjoy stream-of-consciousness poetry or unhinged personal blog posts. It's fine.
But most of us (I think) read for our own gain, expecting substantial / stimulating text that is ideally well researched and serves a clear purpose.
Something like that needs an editor, effective proofreading, and quite some time of work and rework.
At this point, it is far more distracting to see LLM-isms and get completely thrown out of the reading-understanding process than to see some typos or grammatical errors. I actually feel reassured when I see something like a "they're/their" swap, because I know I am reading the author's thoughts instead of some linear algebra vaguely influenced by the author's thoughts.
Five years ago, I probably would have been annoyed by the same.
An editor's role is not fixing typos and grammar (that's the proofreader's job). The editor helps you order your thoughts, pointing out inconsistencies, redundancies, or general lapses in reasoning. When I talk about "unedited," I meant without a clear point, repetitive, unreferenced, etc, etc.
I have nothing against LLMs for proofreading. I'm actually using one now to fix my grammar because English is my second language. I won't let it change my points, though... it's just for cleaning up without having to spend 3x the time on a comment, editing out minor mistakes.
I'm aware this might make my posts feel less natural, but I think it's a good middle ground.
> why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).
This is a specifically funny question because every Masaokis video is better than every MrBeast video
Compare thoughts on this notion of AI and authenticity in writing to the way things like auto-tuners and sequencers have been perceived in the music world.
Like there are some esoteric corners of the Jazz space where musicians seem to try to emulate a sequencing machine and play perfect notes, will there be writers trying to emulate the clean AI performance? :-/
While I can get behind the sentiment I hope bad writing doesn't become the standard for anti AI. A simple grammar check would have greatly improved this post.
AI has plenty of training data on poor writing. If people start looking for bad grammar and typos to identify human articles, generative AI is certainly capable of spitting out prose that looks poorly edited.
I kind of hope the anti-AI-writing stuff passes and we can focus on what makes writing good or bad again instead of “this is clearly AI” posted in response to every blog. I actually don’t care if it’s AI but I do care if it’s worth reading and pleasant to read.
When most of the AI written blog posts are just written via a "write a blog post about X" prompt. I don't see any value in reading any of it. If I want to know what ChatGPT thinks of a given subject I'd just ask it directly.
Seemed like satire to me. The author is pretty intentionally oblivious, and even suggests that other people see flaws in their writing that they don’t see. Also, the most egregious errors are right after comments about grammar and such.
The relative value of those things are shifting. As the cost of polished LLM drivel falls to zero, some might prefer even the most unedited, off-the-cuff human writing to the slop.
I have stopped spell checking, grammar checking, and generally doing a lot of editing of my writing so that it feels more authentic. I have also had to give up my habit of prolific use of emdashes.
It depends on the purpose of the reader. I can learn a technical topic from an LLM but not what another person genuinely thinks. I certainly can't convince it of anything nor befriend it.
I mean there's lots of room at the bottom. but part of the reason LLM slop seems to me so objectionable is its sameness; it's obviously drawn from the same thin manifold of the language. A human articulating their own thoughts, however those may be rendered on the page, at least realizes their own idiosyncratic region of the language. Writing one's own thoughts in one's own words declares the existence of one's own language, consonant with but distinct from all the others. Asserting one's individual voice and style, even if the content is worthless and the aesthetics objectionable maintains diversity in face of the LLM monoculture. We lament the lost apples, even the bitter ones; we don't ask the birds to each justify their differences.
Indeed. I for one enjoyed this piece. Yes, it had errors and lots of odd grammatical choices, but the reading remained affordably challenging and the prose had a newness to it.
These people's writing is usually incoherent and they are very proud of it. If you've ever read a bad new-age self-help book you've probably encountered writing like this.
Good writers understand that writing is about communication. The initial act of writing (ie, word puke) is worthless. What matters most is a piece of writing's ability to communicate clearly.
This writing is usually pleasant, concise, and clear.