Alephic Writing Style Guide | Hacker News Reader

Alephic Writing Style Guide

alephic.com

52 pointsotoolep45 comments

I recognize that the following is a classic HN "middlebrow dismissal" but I'd be wary of taking writing advice from a company that has this text (and nothing else) on their homepage:

> Alephic is an AI-first technology foundry built to tackle marketing's most complex challenges. We don't just advise—we engineer, prototype, and deploy custom AI systems that help marketing teams do the impossible.

I read this twice and I still have no idea what they do!

That’s not bad writing; it's intentional ambiguity. Alephic wants potential clients to understand that they do "AI stuff," so when a company is looking for help with "AI stuff", they can say, "Yes! Of course we do that!" — regardless of the specifics. B2B services companies frame their offering ambiguously to cast the widest possible net. They'll write a custom pitch once they know what a lead actually needs.

Sure but I only understood that they do "AI stuff" in an agency model after I read the founder's reply to my comment. His reply ("Basically we work with marketers on ai stuff.") is just as ambiguous, and yet immediately clear.

Also its blunt directness resonates deeply with me, but that might just be me of course. I wish agencies would put things like "Basically we work with marketers on ai stuff" on their homepages.

That's especially ludicrous considering the linked article, which is listing a bunch of style guidelines which would probably make an AI stand out like a sore thumb.

> Just as Borges' Aleph represents the convergence of all points in the universe, Alephic stands at the intersection of AI, code, and marketing expertise.

C’mon isn’t it obvious.

"Just as Borges' Asterion represents a prisoner who imagines his prison a palace, our bussiness relies utterly on the llms of other private companies"

The impossible, obviously.

Alephic co-founder here. Basically we work with marketers on ai stuff.

  Do                                  Don't
  Think from first principles         Repeat what everyone else is saying Draw from 
  diverse references and domains      Stay confined to marketing jargon

"We paint visions of transformative change while keeping one foot firmly in practical reality."

Famously non-jargon, non-marketing language never encountered before in a tech blog

Another writing style guide, barely distinguishable from many others, but written in tone like it's radically different. Maybe this is precisely the point, though.

No space for poetry.

No space for fun.

All arguments from authority

That only missionary position

Is permissable.

Quite in line with the Puritan heritage of the US.

Perhaps it should be clarified that this is a writing guide for marketing material and the formula is the same as always; concise sentences with a focus on action (readers almost always need to be pushed to click something, do something or buy something). If you write a blog, fiction or poetry, this writing guide will most likely crush any creativity, originality and desire to write.

If you want to learn how to write well, your best bet is to read different great writers and notice how they write, what they write about and what they leave out. Take one of their sentences and rewrite it in your own words.Deconstruct every sentence. Deconstruct every sentence.Take their sentences and rewrite it in your own words.

It’s my guide, and I agree completely. Not even sure this is useful for other companies and definitely not fiction.

This is nice but they forgot to mention the most important rule all guides like this should mention first: There are no hard-and-fast rules, all rules have an exception.

For example, including unnecessary sentences and paragraphs is somethings necessary. You can do without them but with them you get character, voice, a smoother transition. How do you know what is necessary and what isn't? That's the whole point of the rule I mentioned earlier.

Which is also mentioned in Strunk and White but I doubt they read it

Ha. I’m the author of the guide and most certainly read it. Started my career as a journalist.

Well if this makes money good for you lol

Well, I'm sure it makes a decent system prompt.

That’s mostly the point. https://newsletter.brxnd.ai/p/docs-x-ai-brxnd-dispatch-vol-8...

You'd imagine the cynicism would at some point become evident, but it isn't even really there to evince, is it.

I first thought this is from the German AI/LLM company Aleph Alpha [1] but learned it is a different enterprise albeit in the same domain. It's still quite a hustle and bustle in the zoo, I'm looking forward to a little more overview and a little less hype …

[1] https://aleph-alpha.com/

I had exactly the same confusion, also having heard of Aleph before. Then I googled to check and saw that "Aleph Alpha had pivoted away from training their own LLMs", so I figured it _was_ the same only to figure out that it isn't.

We're running out of names.

It's interesting to me that the article itself employs quite a few stylistic choices that are often marked as "obvious LLM tells" (numbered lists, boldface everywhere, and even the no-space emdash right in the opening paragraph).

I'm a heavy user of those things myself... still: interesting, given what they seem to be doing.

There's a footnote right at the bottom that says:

[1] Also, AI be damned, we are going to keep using em dashes!

> Use "1800s/1900s/2000s" instead of "19th/20th/21st century". Using century numbers is confusing for many people because the 19th century actually refers to the 1800s. For clarity, always use the specific years.

Way to assume your audience are morons.

Personally I love it when people do this. It's just.. it saves me the few seconds it takes, every time, to subtract "1" from the number.

It's not that hard with "20th century" which I'm conditioned to map to "last century" immediately, but when someone did something in the 17th century I first think "Oh like 1750-ish" and then I realize I'm a century off, and it disrupts my reading flow.

I find it remarkable that it's that hard for you.

They do not say it was hard. There is a difference between being hard and requiring 0.5 second more of thinking, which can and does disrupt the reading flow.

Exactly this. I actually think it’s exactly the opposite of assuming your audience is a stupid: it’s respecting them enough to do the work yourself instead of offloading to them. I’ll die on the hill that 19th century referring to the 1800s is fundamentally unintuitive.

It shouldn't take 0.5 seconds of thinking, unless you're a total historical illiterate.

You're not arguing in good faith here. Which is fine, but then please stop insulting others.

On the internet, best growth strategy is to assume your audience are morons.

> Way to assume your audience are morons.

Is there really much benefit in framing it this way?

I see the phrasing decision as raising several questions for the author:

1) Who is your audience?

2) What are your goals for the communication?

I could imagine either phrasing choice making sense depending on the answers.

> the 19th century actually refers to the 1800s

Also, this isn't strictly accurate: the 19th century excludes 1800 but includes 1900.

No, it's worse than that.

"The 1800s" typically refers to the years 1800-1809. "The 1900s" refers to 1900-1909. It is by no means unambiguous, but this is the common and plain meaning, and indeed these folks may confuse many more people by attempting in this manner to refer to 1800-1899 or such.

I disagree. When people typically pronounce, for example, "1800s," they would say "Eighteen Hundreds," with the plural suffixing "hundred," implying a period of far longer than a decade. If trying to reference the decade following 1800, in conversation I would say "the Eighteen Noughts."

I don't know what sort of localized English you speak, but that is not how it works in America. [Based on past comments, you may be located in Australia. I could certainly understand if there are local phenomena in your language there.]

If we say "In the nineteen hundreds..." we mean 1900-1910. If we said "In the ninteen fifties" we would not be implying a 50-year period, would we? If we said "In the nineteen nineties" are we implying a 90-year period? Do you see how your logic immediately breaks down? Is it mere accident that "the ninteen tens" is a ten-year period of time? Yes it is...

Your assertions and these patterns of speech are just bizarre. I don't know anyone who says, or writes, "the Eighteen Noughts" at all. It is not a thing for scholars of history, for sure.

For a while it has been debated how we'll refer to 2000-2009. Because in different centuries, those initial ten years gained unique names. Some people want to call it "The Aughts" or "The Noughts" but I don't really hear people referring to "The Two Thousands" yet, at all; it's largely "The 21st Century".

I’m still trying to grok this post from the same company

https://www.alephic.com/the-one-true-path

Writing like this leads to very terse, cold and impersonal communications. Perhaps it would be good for dry technical instructions or documentation, but naught else.

This doesn't distract that you built a business around chatbots. Who gives a damn about the writing style you use to pimp them on us

A lot of this is good and overlaps quite a bit with our one [0], but a lot of it seems to be too fluffy and go against its own rules.

> At the intersection of AI, code, and marketing expertise, we create solutions that were impossible yesterday and will be commonplace tomorrow.

I couldn't tell if this was an example of what they want or what they don't want.

Also the dos and dont's are vague enough that I can imagine the CEO or whoever wrote this saying "no your sentence is bad because it's getting lost in the tacitcal minutiae, but mine is good because I'm focusing on strategic, long-term implications"

- DO: Focus on strategic, long-term implications

- DON'T: Get lost in tactical minutiae

Similarly:

- DO: Acknowledge the magnitude of AI's impact

- DON'T: Overhype capabilities beyond what's currently possible

isn't it easier to just say 'always use your crystal ball to perfectly explain how AI will affect our future'.

> Utilize diagrams, screenshots, charts, and other visual aids to clarify complex concepts. For software documentation, use animated GIFs or videos when static images won't suffice.

Probably means something like "Use diagrams, screenshots, and charts appropriately. Use animated gifs where needed"

Which again is kind of just saying "make it good", but with words like "utilize" and "suffice" which are probably sprinkled in with AI.

[0] https://styleguide.ritza.co

For decades I've noticed people writing "utilize" where I'd prefer "use".

I suspect that in some cases it was meant to sound smarter or more formal. Similarly to using "myself" rather than "me" contrary to traditional grammar rules.

But now maybe it's just language drift that I need to accept.

There is a strong AI-smell from this page

Thanks for the shout-out, glad you enjoyed it.

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