[chromacity]

Like the original Grammarly, I think this can be useful for business writing because these tools help you get to the point. Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays, but if you're composing an email or writing a design doc, just optimize for reading time and clarity.

But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such as "crucial". It's that most LLM articles on LinkedIn or on personal blogs just take a one-sentence prompt and dress it up into a lot of pointless words, wasting everyone's time: "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be far fewer of them?

On the flip side, if you're a human and actually have something of consequence to say, "delve" all you want.

[Swizec]

> "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?

Always judge an author by the length of their text.

Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.

Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.

[Aurornis]

> Always judge an author by the length of their text.

Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.

Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.

[VorpalWay]

There is such a thing as balance. For some reason it tends to be very easy to go overboard in either direction.

Also, any metric ceases to be a good metric the moment it becomes a goal.

I have observed both of the above statements in many different contexts, they seem to be (somewhat) universal rules for human society.

[ljm]

I've also observed the third direction, which is the message storm.

That's when someone breaks down their point into multiple separate messages, one sentence at a time, when a single coherent paragraph or two would have worked. Why send one message when you can send 7 in rapid succession?

It's arguably the most annoying method of communication because it spams your notifications and you have no idea when someone has finished dumping.

[VorpalWay]

I think that is in line with what I said: a balance is best. I have seen the opposite of what you described: long messages with no paragraph breaks. Not great either.

[debesyla]

Dumping every sentence saves up tokens in human mind ;-)

[abustamam]

Tangential but it kinda irks me when people just put their initials when signing off on an email. It seems like unnecessary brevity in a world where you can type your name once in your emails signature line and never worry about typing it again.

[jampekka]

How about not writing the name at all? It's already in the email header.

[goodmythical]

support@domain, info@domain, purchasing@domain, sales@domain, etc

I can quickly imagine several situations in which one might speak to a public facing individual but still like to say "I was told by {sales rep} that {statement} was the case" or "{Employee} in support assured me this would be resolved in {timeperiod}" or "I had an excellent conversation with {employee} and want to ensure they'll be getting any commission due to them because they really convinced me more than your website"

[pona-a]

See RFC 5322:

  From: "John Doe" <[e-mail]>

[abustamam]

Eh, I'm ambivalent. Letters in the mail have a From and people still sign them and some people even date them even if there's a post mark. At this point though it's more work for me to remove my signature. Plus my signature has my phone number.

[goodmythical]

“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”

[rav3ndust]

little offtopic, but speaking of, someone just made a coding agent plugin that makes it save tokens by speaking like caveman

[ChrisMarshallNY]

So it’s really about the content; not the metrics.

My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.

She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.

French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.

[grahamplace]

As the saying goes: “If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter”

[littlexsparkee]

So many books that could've been an article. I try to save myself time by checking Goodreads but it's not always clear as I'm more critical than the average person. Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off. Appreciate that lately new books are sometimes featured in pubs with an excerpt.

[alfiedotwtf]

There’s an interesting thought!

For hundreds of years there have been incentives (money) to publish books, and yet in 2026 we still haven’t worked out how to monetarily incentivise authors of single articles without bundling them with articles or other authors you wouldn’t read (because you only care about a single article damnit

[cineticdaffodil]

The worst is scifibooks that explore ideas but the authors afraid of literary critics jam in "real" characters with real "drama" to satisfy a crowd who does not get the purpose of the medium, even while they life inside one of those accelerando shortstories now.

[mold_aid]

Sure, but also: so many articles that could be books. I think all the articles should be books! I don't want to read all those books but hey go for it

[eduction]

What you say makes no sense by your own logic. 200 words can be wonderfully filled with wisdom or devoid of insight depending how much work and experience went into those words. So it is not appropriate to judge an author by the length of their text. You need length/wisdom but you can’t objectively or quickly determine the denominator.

[card_zero]

So, not in fact the length of the text, which is constant at 200 pages.

[tombert]

Tangential, but I remember when I was studying for the ACT, there was something in one of the practice books that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "Good writing is clear and easy to understand. It's about communication, make sure you communicate".

It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.

[Angostura]

Good writing and good communication is also about keeping the reader engaged and concentrating, however. Even in business writing - for example, how-tos or intranet pages, altering sentence length, using rhetorical questions can be helpful. I'm concerned that tools like this will tend to stamp out useful writing conventions, that were picked up by LLMs precisely because they were useful.

The result? Increasingly homogeneous, boring text.

[moron4hire]

This is something I've been working on in my own professional writing for years. I used to write very long emails, thinking I was providing insight and detail, but nobody would even bother reading them because it was such a chore.

I consider more than three paragraphs and more than two sentences per paragraph a "writing smell." It's relatively easy now, especially when I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness.

I try to limit my emails to one, clear, strong point—usually just factual statements—in the active voice, eschewing adverbs as much as possible. The emails almost write themselves now, because there isn't much choice on what to write anymore.

[simonbw]

> I realized my predilection for verbosity was actually a symptom of my own insecurity, emotionalism, and indecisiveness.

Ok, Mr. Milchick.

[moron4hire]

Milchik's problem was that he worshipped--quite literally--the company. I do this for my own gain. I started getting much more of what I wanted out of work and other formal relationships (my kids' teachers, my doctors, etc) when I got honest with how I was communicating and how I was being perceived and changed my habits to suit.

[golem14]

Check out the books by Rudolf Flesch. Old school, but ever more applicable. Also, Bugs in writing, by Lyn Dupree.

[teddyh]

I recommend <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM>, Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively.

[danilocesar]

I've heard this theory in the past:

In a couple of years, the corporative communication will work like this:

You write a bunch of bullet points and feed them to an AI to create a beautiful and well written email. Your reader will feed that email into his own AI and he will generate bullet points to read.

[red_admiral]

I've heard the story of the time e-mail was new and one secretary's job was to print out her boss's emails, he'd write a reply below by hand, and she'd type it back in and send it.

[gattr]

In other words, just as they did in "Rob Roy": "My factor will contact Your Grace's factor..."

[slopinthebag]

> Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays

Not to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).

Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)

[flexagoon]

In uni, maybe. But my experience in middle/high school was that hitting the minimum word count was much more important than actually good writing.

[abustamam]

The concept of word count in high school was bonkers. Knowing my teacher wouldn't check, I wrote a dense line with a lot of words, using small print and small words, and then used that as my baseline (so let's say it had 20 words). Then if I needed 200 words total I'd write ten lines, knowing full well that other lines of text would only have 10-15 words.

Cheating? Maybe. But it's a silly metric to begin with, and obviously the teacher didn't actually care about the count because I got an A in most of my essays.

[mold_aid]

Yes - US high school instruction in writing is something I have to spend weeks un-teaching in first year and majors courses.

[flexagoon]

I'm not in the US, I guess English classes are just like that around the world.

As a non-native speaker, I learned so much more by just watching YouTube in English than in middle and high school English classes combined

[red_admiral]

And having a topic sentence, and sometimes even deliberately using rhetorical devices like parallelism that a LLM detector would flag up.

[edaemon]

Yeah, this comic summarizes the issue pretty well: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

[lokar]

As a senior engineer I spend a lot of time reviewing and approving technical designs, PRDs etc.

Over the years the amount of basic copy editing I have to do has really grown. I sometimes feel like I’m removing 20%+ of the text. And that was before LLMs.

[tedggh]

Ask your team to make their documentation at least 30% shorter just before sending. I don’t remember where I first I read this advice for writing code, but it’s been part of my workflow for several years. It’s an arbitrary number, but it forces you think how to make things simpler. I apply the same principle when packing for travel or hiking.

[lokar]

I once ended up helping (a bit) editing a book (with chapters written by various co-workers). My main contribution was deleting whole chapters. And telling others to make it 50% as long.

[abustamam]

For better or for worse my team has standardized on using Miro for technical designs and diagrams. It's a lot easier to visualize the system in a diagram than it is to talk about it in prose.

I think it's important to choose the right medium for communication though. Some things just need to be written out concisely.

[ljm]

Mermaid has been great for a similar reason. For example, you can render a mermaid diagram inside a PR description on GitHub.

Comes in handy when describing a state machine or the flow of data.

[abustamam]

Yeah! I recently discovered those, mainly because Claude seems to love mermaid diagrams, and Cursor has a renderer for it (it's not great but it's pretty easy to port to Miro)

[Teever]

Flowery language is important but something like BLUF - Bottom Line Upfront[0] is important too.

While it's important for universities to continue to teach the ability to write using 'flowery' language I think that it is also important that schools teach students something like BLUF -- Bottom Line Upfront.[0]

Compare and contrast those two sentences. I'm fine writing a comment that us just the first sentence and the link without a footnote but I know as a message it won't go over well on a site like Hackernews. They looooooove their verbosity here.

So in some situations you have to gussy it up -- give it some of that Emeril "BAM". The deal is that you have to know your audience. The medium is the message.[1] shit like that.

Stuff on Linkedin is full of pointless words because that's what Linkedin is for -- it's about signalling to other people that you can string together a bunch of pointless words that are effusive and vaguely passive aggressive at the same time -- you know, typical business shit.

“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”

We can delve into this kinda stuff but really it just comes back to the know your audience and that the medium is the message. Also don't repeat your self.

Definitely don't repeat yourself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

[cineticdaffodil]

"Can you condense that down further without loosing clarity? " goes into every prompt.

[6031769]

I can condense that and improve clarity simply by s/oo/o/

[jollyllama]

>The problem is not X. It's Y.

Your writing style, if not your thoughts, have already been infected by LLM prose.

[chromacity]

No. I've been using that construct long before LLMs and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It allows you to succinctly state the position you're disagreeing with before putting forward another hypothesis. LLMs overuse it for needless emphasis, with the negative example usually reduced to a single word.

[jollyllama]

It's never been so prevalent as now, it's everywhere. I didn't mean any of this as a bad faith thing, it genuinely is changing how people think, speak, etc. Also, I don't consider hedging or defensive writing or negative definitions succinct (it's not a wall of text, granted) and in ordinary times it did indeed have its place.

Edit: I would add that you literally followed the formula in every respect except for a single word, and IMO LLMs are already changing to avoid the single-word formulation.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

Anyone over the age of 25 actually developed their writing style before ChatGPT came about. Getting all uppity about these surface-level LLM ‘tropes’ is just stupid. I am thankfully yet to run into a situation where someone with this attitude is actually in a position to be able to negatively affect my life. I’m sure that there’s a correlation. Take the “ew, em-dash” stuff back to Twitter.

[mech422]

Yeah - writing styles have really changed over the years. Last time I ran a business document thru Grammarly, I was told it wasn't written at a 6(8?) grade level and was too complex :-P

When I first started out, I was taught you use passive voice in proposals (eg 'a program will be written..' not 'I will write a program...') since you didn't know who was actually going to write it. I can't imagine how that would go over now...

[kstrauser]

Strunk & White said not to use passive voice since, what, the 1920s? “We will write a program”, or “one of us will write a program” works without passivizing it.

[goodmythical]

What if the program is to be subbed out?

Just because two guys got together a hundred years ago and wrote some stuff doesn't mean it's worth dedicating a life of writing to.

Let alone decades of arguments supporting the claim that their style guide is at best only useful for a small subset of writing, the two themselves admit that there can be no one universal styling guide in a variety of ways. You can see many examples in the text itself in which the authors seem to forget their own advice.

Consider:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

Which could communicated much more succinctly containing exactly the same information without any extra exposition:

Vigor is concision. A piece should contain nothing unnecessary, just as a drawing has no unnecessary lines [needless repetition](and a machine no unnecessary parts). This requires not that all sentences short be short, but that every word tell.

Or even more succinctly with only the actual message:

Vigorous writing is concise. Concise writing is vigorous (If you're willing to be charitable enough to provide a second example)

That this does not require unnecessary brevity is easily inferred given that the word is "concise" meaning "free from all elaboration and superfluous detail." not "brief" meaning "short". That the writer should follow the advice is made plain by it being presented in a book of advice. The first two sentences alone (if you grant that the second sentence is necessary) contain four repetitions of the same information. If "vigorous writing is concise" then why have we said the same thing five times?

[jerf]

Style guides always implicitly carry context for what they are the style guides for. Most of them are for journalism in one way or another. Passive voice is clearly wrong in journalism. All actions were taken by someone. All results stem from someone's actions.

It is an error to apply those style guides blindly to mismatched contexts. Other than as an exercize in following a style guide, it is not great to teach students that they should always write in a journalistic style, because it is simply untrue. There is nothing wrong with writing "A program will be written" when it is unknown who will write a program, and it is an error to avoid the passive voice by adding incorrect details.

[jollyllama]

I don't really even subscribe to the notion that things like passive voice can be bad, but if suddenly everything we read started to be written in passive voice, I'd decry it as obnoxious.

[jollyllama]

I resent your em-dash reductivism and "stupid" insult. The LLM cliches got old very fast.

> I am thankfully yet to run into a situation where someone with this attitude is actually in a position to be able to negatively affect my life

I don't get it, you're so attached to certain cliches that to attack them in person would somehow be a detriment to you?

> I’m sure that there’s a correlation.

What are you implying?

[tom_]

This doesn't apply here - I don't think? The article claims X; so it is surely no sin for the post rebutting it to straight up state that X is, in fact, not the case.

The LLM tic, by contrast, has a noticeable tendency to be deployed even when X has never been previously mentioned. It is a valid rhetorical technique, and I assume that's why the LLMs have picked up on it - but it has to be deployed judiciously. Which is something LLMs appear absolutely incapable of doing. And that is why people notice it, and think it sucks.

[comex]

Just because LLMs overuse it doesn't mean it doesn't have its place.

The way the OP used the 'not X, but Y' pattern, the 'X' and 'Y' are two clear, specific, and (most importantly) distinct things, as opposed to stereotypical LLM usage where they're vague characterizations or metaphors. And there's a reason to emphasize that it's not X, because the Slop Cop website implicitly suggests that it is X.

[sdthjbvuiiijbb]

Nonsense. It's a common construction that LLMs didn't exactly invent. I don't think their usage evokes LLM writing at all (not short and punchy enough).