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Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

> use Grammarly Pro to rewrite your sentences into coherence

Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing?

Like, shouldn't you be expected to at least have competence in your craft? Writing with correct grammar should be the baseline of someone writing for profit. Or even "help with an outline", if you can't write an outline of what you're trying to communicate, and you need the averaging machine to help you, do you actually have a unique understanding of the topic? Or are you merely rehashing existing content that's been fed into the averaging machine?

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It is bizarre if you don't take it quite literally. In practice, it is possible, even for seasoned writers, to sometimes create sentences that could use a bit of attention. If Grammarly is the right tool for that can be debated, but that is the case for any tool.

I feel like your response is along the lines of "programmers shouldn't use syntax highlighting" and similar arguments against tooling.

Then there are also the folks out there who want to publish their writings in English, but for who English is not their native language. They might use sentence structures that don't work quite as well in English as they do in their native language.

I think I may have been taking it too literally.

I read "writer feeds incoherent sentence into a tool", when it was probably an exaggeration.

The multi-lingual thing is also a good point.

I guess it depends on what you call making your money on writing. At one point, most of my money was from writing emails. I can't really spell and somehow my grammar is worse. LanguageTool, and whatever plug in/extension/google search copy and paste that I've previously used, allows me to communicate the same message but without spelling/grammar mistake many people would see.

There is almost no chance I'm going to spend a significant amount of time relearning grammar and how to spell. But that has almost nothing to do with my ability to communicate or make money writing. The grammar tools just translate my sentences into the format we've all agreed is correct. Almost like a linter but for English.

This use-case makes a lot more sense.

I think it's just you. That's like saying you should know how to spell perfectly if you're a professional writer, and should not use spell check. LLMs are just spell check on steroids.

What about the argument of using the AI to create an outline? Surely spelling has no effect on the outline if you understand the concept? The outline isn't being published, it's just the author laying out their thoughts on a topic that they're claiming to have some authority in.

If the author cannot outline their ideas, even with bad grammar and spelling, do they actually understand the concept?

I am not a natural language professional so I don't fully understand how outlines are used by authors. If I map that to software, I might think of asking an LLM to generate pseudocode for something. Of course I could do this myself (assuming I understand the problem domain), but why not ask an LLM to help me? I will just use whatever it generates as a starting point and edit it to fit my goals and specific objectives. Maybe outline tools are used to do something similar?

I don't really care about grammar so long as the point is communicated. Some people are trying to write in a non-native language, or just need a bit of help. Whatever tooling that helps improve communication is great, I think the content is more important than the language used to communicate it.

Also your point could be made equally well about people using spellcheck.

I've written a number of books, 3 of them bestsellers, and I've always looked for outside input to help with the outline.

When you're close to a deadline, or too close to the subject, you need some outside guidance to make sure you're not missing some obvious step in getting your point across.

It's not always easy to find someone that knows how to be a great sounding board. They need to be very smart system thinkers, naive about the topic, engaged and interested. I have such friends, but I try to use their time sparingly.

So now I do use AI to either provide a first-draft of an outline for new content, or (my preferred MO) to review my own first draft suggest missing items I should cover.

Exactly, tools like this help bring your writing up to "average", if you're making a living writing, you should already be much better than that. It's kind of like a painter using a "paint by numbers" canvas.

> Is it just me or is this a bizarre practice for someone who is actively making money on writing?

No, its not bizarre for paid writers to use tools that are a lower-overhead replacement for paid copy-editors when using a platform that's entire value is that it serves as a lower-overhead replacement for a publishing house but which also doesn't provide most of the things a publishing house would provide except distribution and payment processing.

It's really the most natural thing in the world. If AI was up to snuff for it, it wouldn't be surprisibg for Medium authors to use automated tools to function as editors (not merely copy editors) as well.

Applying your argument to coding, it would be about writing near perfect code without autocomplete, boilerplate templates, and be able to cleanly match types without static analysis or the compiler yelling after us.

That's a nice ideal to strive for, but that wouldn't make us all better programmers or not worth actively getting paid for programming.

I think I was taking the original comment too literally, but I still don't think this comparison applies.

Tools to rewrite basic sentence structure requires a lack of sentence structure in the first place. It's like needing a tool to make your foo-bar run.

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