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Slop Cop

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Re: Slop Cop

#141

Post by pona-a »

goodmythical wrote: post #129
jampekka wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 commiss…

See RFC 5322:

  From: "John Doe"

Re: Slop Cop

#142

Post by eduction »

Swizec wrote: post #31
chromacity wrote: post #22

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…

> "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 tal…

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.

Re: Slop Cop

#143

Post by zaptheimpaler »

This is so dumb. LLMs have some patterns they copied from people, so now people need to stop using those patterns? Not to mention 10000000 famous books, stories, speeches, essays, comments and more are flagged by these stupid tools. These kinds of tools only narrow the scope of our expression and over time can suffocate the entire written language into a single flavour of corporate approved not-slop speak. Yes AI writing is bad, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

Re: Slop Cop

#144

Post by debesyla »

ljm wrote: post #131
VorpalWay wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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

Re: Slop Cop

#145

Post by mold_aid »

littlexsparkee wrote: post #41
Swizec wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 tal…

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.

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

Re: Slop Cop

#147

Post by mold_aid »

flexagoon wrote: post #68
slopinthebag wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

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.

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

Re: Slop Cop

#148

Post by simonbw »

moron4hire wrote: post #133
tombert wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 min…

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 act…

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

Ok, Mr. Milchick.

Re: Slop Cop

#149

Post by Noaidi »

Oh. My. God.

I had a suspicion that a friend was using AI to respond to my texts///and this said he was!!!

It caught a "Short-Hook Paragraph" and "Negation Pivot" and "Staccato Burst" in one text.

Wonderful tool!

Re: Slop Cop

#150

Post by jerf »

kstrauser wrote: post #118
mech422 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

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.

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