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I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

marcusolang.substack.com

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Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#291

Post by HPsquared »

wcfrobert wrote: post #281
komali2 wrote: post #80

> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged we…

Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose. (1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head. (2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred. Here's a good David Foster Wallace…

Rich vocabulary allows a lot of meaning to be packed into short, simple structures. The words themselves carry the subtleties. It might take three or four simple words to convey the meaning of one uncommon word.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#292

Post by mjrpes »

__lain__ wrote: post #274
komali2 wrote: post #80

> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged we…

Hemingway was still a master of word choice. I recall an entire class spent on a few lines that conveyed a sense of heaviness to the scene. 'Plodding' was given a lot of attention.

I remember a college English class where a good part of the lecture was on this sentence from Big Two-Hearted River: "He liked to open cans." Forget the details but it got into the difference between achievement and accomplishment.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#293

Post by toss1 »

mr_00ff00 wrote: post #266
GMoromisato wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version. Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/rep…

Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing. I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point. When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally. Any other way of writi…

>> Just spell it out literally.

Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in each of the example sentences — literally saying what the subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace, attitude, and feeling.

This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of words. It is the most literal way to spell it out.

A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning without more words.

Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader. Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing it without going too far the other way and making the writing unintelligibly dense).

Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function to produce the desired output.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#294

Post by iainctduncan »

This essay is effin' brilliant, and beautifully written.

I'm not Kenyan, but I was raised in a Canadian family of academics, where mastering thoughtful – but slightly archaic – writing was expected of me. I grew up surrounded by books that would now be training material, and who's prose would likely now be flagged as ChatGPT.

Just another reason to hate all this shit.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#295

Post by zahlman »

Animats wrote: post #290

I was just reading the 1897 style guide of the City News Bureau (Chicago), in the book "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!". Some highlights: - Do not confuse 'night' with 'evening'. - This office spells it 'programme'. - Hotels are 'kept', not 'run'. - Dead men do not leave 'wives', but they may leave 'widows'. - 'Very' is a word often used without discrimination. It is not difficult to express the same meaning when…

For what it's worth, LWN maintains the same attitude towards "very" today.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#296

Post by acuozzo »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #216
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I don't use it.

Yeah, this is what I don't understand, surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately. I assumed MS word was just inserting them automatically when the user used a minus symbol between two words. Kind of like angled quotes.

> surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately

I've had a "trigger finger" for Alt+0151 on Windows since 2010 at least.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#297

Post by michaelt »

wcfrobert wrote: post #281
komali2 wrote: post #80

> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged we…

Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose. (1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head. (2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred. Here's a good David Foster Wallace…

Even when communicating ideas, there's a simplicity/nuance trade-off to be made.

I could say "Trump's unpredictable, seemingly irrational policy choices have alienated our allies, undermined trust in public institutions, and harmed the US economy"

Or I could "The economy sucks and it's Trump's fault because he's dumb and an asshole"

They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#298

Post by heavyset_go »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #211
komali2 wrote: post #80

> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged we…

I have two kids in high school. It's frustrating to me that the teachers spend so much of their time encouraging kids to make their writing more interesting, and less direct, and padded to meet word length criteria. They'll then spend the first few years of their career unlearning this and attempting to write as directly and clearly as possible with as few words as possible.

This is like complaining that they teach the Bohr model in science classes until they reach chemistry.

The ideas, concepts and expectations can be refined after you've learned the foundational knowledge, skills and history required to do so.

A lot of "why do we do things like that" questions students will naturally have can be answered with "because we used to do things like this/we need to avoid things like this/etc"

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#299

Post by iLemming »

It could be also because, we foreigners learn to write English prose through our reading comprehension, not via our listening circuitry. The text probably feels "normal" to me when I read it back to myself, but there's no "proper" feedback loop from the native speakers - I have zero idea how my written shit sounds to a native ear when they try to read it. I still do agree though, it feels so friggin' annoying these days to have to deliberately butcher some words and make sure there's a typo somehwere in your text, just to convince people that tis indeed a crap straight from my "head to the paper", not a slop.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#300

Post by guerrilla »

Barrin92 wrote: post #284
guerrilla wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a very good argument, because then you could say the same for American, Canada, South Africa, Australia and so on. If recency is an issue, then here's a list of colonies that got their freedom around the same time: Cyprus, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kuwait, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Malta, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados, Yemen, Mauritius, Eswatini (Swaz…

>They're radically different because they're radically different regions. They're radically different predominantly at the street level and everyday usage, but the kind of professional English of journalists, academics and writers that the author of the article was surrounded by is very recognizable. You can tell an American from an Australian on the beach but in a journal or article in a paper of record that's much…

That's not my experience at all. I can quite easily identify Kenyans, Australians and English from the way they write and they're all rather unique.

Go read some Kenyan news. It's very obvious.

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