The modern formatting addiction in writing
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
In the fifth grade, we were required to write an outline for our research project essay. Imagine my delight when writing the paper was as easy as copying the outline and adding a couple extra words.
That value of formatting into bulleted lists reminds me of the McPhee method of writing, which was shared last year on HN. He manipulates physical note cards to write, and I was manipulating digital ones.
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>Namely, why do so many people today seem to write more like Exhibit A than Exhibit B?
Because they're writing for an audience that's not really looking for something to read. See Axios and Smart Brevity:
Only knew it as the "Axios style" so far and was always weirded out by it. Their articles read more like a form letter than an actual text.
Good to know it has a name.
It is also notable that the Feynman lectures (3 volumes) write about all of physics in 1800 pages, using only 2 levels of hierarchical headings: chapters and A-level heads in the text. It also uses the methodology of sentences which then cumulate sequentially into paragraphs, rather than the grunts of bullet points. Undergraduate Caltech physics is very complicated material, but it didn’t require an elaborate hierarchy to organize.
I think about it a lot when reading markdown feature-driven writing or catching myself doing it.
• When writing for myself, I tend to open a buffer and just ramble. I write like I speak, which is how someone I know irl clocked my Hackernews account.
• My wife appreciates the writing I produce this way. Sometimes I just sit and read aloud to her.
• When presenting material for work, it tends to go across much more clearly when I write like a damn AI.
Inferences that can be drawn:
• Reading for pleasure is a thing
• Some of us prefer long-form when reading for pleasure
• However, when on the job we prefer parsimony and preset structure
Now, though, I may be dismissed as an LLM (probably as an older model that can't quite use them formatting tools effectively).
But the trick is I usually write like I would speak. This leads to italicizing any word or phrase I'd speak emphatically. (Which, yes, I've also been called out for doing a lot when I speak. So what; I've also been told I'm good at getting my point across. I'll take it!) In any text important enough to go through multiple revisions, or to be written from the start with multiple revisions in mind, this characteristic is diminished. But most text is more throwaway, just like most speech, so it gets left a little rough.
This also tends to feel pretty natural. If you read LLM-written text out loud, or the prose TFA is talking about, it... does not feel natural at all. So what I'm trying to say is: some level of emphasis is just fine. Don't overthink it.
The LLM writing is basically infodump. Lists dressed up in different ways (sections, bullet points, nested bullet points, and sequences of "[bold]Blah blah[/bold]: blah blah blah" sentences.
When I've noticed this it's been in contexts where things lean against text being fully LLM-generated but... who the hell knows.
I hope your friend, having trained one of his personal AI to be you, at least consumes more dynomight content now!
I wish all us were as reflective as you are here:
"I keep finding myself unconsciously treating AI as an anomaly—as a weird thing that’s happening right now before the world goes back to being “normal”. But we aren’t going back. This is how it’s going to be. Like this but more so."