[thimabi]

What do you suggest for articulating the writing style that one wants from LLMs?

I’ve been experimenting with having LLMs write/update academic notebooks for me, and so far the best results I’ve gotten came from correcting their output and asking them what they’ve “learned” from my feedback.

[brookst]

I have a directory of stuff I've written over the years, fiction to tech writing to emails, and then asked claude to generate a style guide based on that corpus. It's surprisingly good. Not perfect, but it definitely extracted a lot of my tone and patterns, and when generating documents for sharing I just prompt with "please rephrase in my voice using the style guide at ~/path"

[esikich]

Use examples and learn about writing. If you're not a good writer, or at least have a passing interest, I'm not sure why anyone would expect it to nail their style any more than you would expect it to architect software in something you're not familiar with.

Give it some paragraphs of writing you like, authors, writers, whatever. Also don't expect to one shot long papers. Have it write out a table of contents and write it in small chunks.

Typical things I'll say is avoid purple prose, avoid common cliches and tropes, "show don't tell", avoid wild metaphors and similes, etc. But it all depends on what you like. Look at things you do like and try to think about what it is about that writing that is different than a middle schooler or an AI writing it. Theres no formula for it.