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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

Because at work I’m typing the same bland things all the time in documents and communications. I appreciate stuff like the predictive word stuff in Google Docs. It’s helpful because business language is expected to be normalized and boring.

On the other side of that token, the average language abilities of the average American office worker are pretty low so I’m assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect and they appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb.

I agree with your point though. And to answer your last question, unfortunately I think the answer is “yes”.

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> Because at work I’m typing the same bland things all the time in documents and communications.

This problem can be solved without text prediction by building a personal knowledge base with hyperlinking[0] and backlinking[1] for discovery, and transclusion[2] for automating writing the same bland things. How I org in 2023 by Nick Anderson[3] goes over a great workflow for this. The advantage of this is that all of the words that you share are actually words that you wrote, instead of sharing words that Google suggested you share.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion [3] https://cmdln.org/2023/03/25/how-i-org-in-2023/

What an obtuse way of saying use links and quote replies

Thanks!

I use macros for frequently-reused messaging but I meant business communication itself. It’s essentially a different dialect of English meant to be “inclusive”, unambiguous, and not prone to misinterpretation.

Anyway, I like and use the feature daily at work. So do lots and lots of other people.

  On the other side of that token, the average language abilities of the average American office worker are pretty low so I’m assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect and they appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb.

Awfully presumptuous, don’t you think?

I would also assume this to be largely true, mainly because of how language in media has gone from being formal and informative to casual and less expressive.

I agree there has been a style shift, I don't think writing has gotten any less informative. I personally don't like formal writing, but either way it has no bearing on whether or not ideas can be gotten across effectively. Substance over style!

> because business language is expected to be normalized and boring

why?

I might say it a bit differently. The amazon writing style is to avoid flowery prose, weasel words (maybe, perhaps, etc), give precise dates, use data, etc. I'd love a model that I could hand to engineers to help them write in this style.

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