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100 sats \ 10 replies \ @Scoresby 22 Jun \ parent \ on: Stacker Saloon
Meaning you think most writing could be shortened?
Clearly, if I ask chat for a summary of Sofia Petrovna, and treat it as having read the book, I'm missing out. I'm sure nobody does that.
I'm sure much writing can be shortened, but I'm curious if writers will start to feel pressure to write more concisely. Will human writing trend towards the un-summarizable? Maximally condensed writing that doesn't require a summary.
related paragraph from Good Writing by Paul Graham:
How could trying to make sentences sound good help you do that? The clue to the answer is something I noticed 30 years ago when I was doing the layout for my first book. Sometimes when you're laying out text you have bad luck. For example, you get a section that runs one line longer than the page. I don't know what ordinary typesetters do in this situation, but what I did was rewrite the section to make it a line shorter. You'd expect such an arbitrary constraint to make the writing worse. But I found, to my surprise, that it never did. I always ended up with something I liked better.I don't think this was because my writing was especially careless. I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in anything written by anyone and told them to make it slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to come up with something better.
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I think if you pointed to a random paragraph in anything written by anyone and told them to make it slightly shorter (or longer), they'd probably be able to come up with something better.
I don't agree with this. For me, at least, there's this thing where, after I have written a thing and revised it a good deal, sometimes I can't change it.
Not that I don't want to, but further revision becomes circular and gets me exactly back to where I was. I've changed a passage and changed it and changed it and sat on it for a few weeks and then tried again and ended up with word for word what I started with.
Arbitrary constraints are good and helpful, though.
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Free of waste is so fuzzy though. I went through a time where I tried to make my writing as concise and condensed as possible. Some of it was good, but I think when I've been given myself more freedom with extra words, I've ended up with better. Were they unnecessary words? I don't know.
But with ai's presence, I think we will see pressure on writers (at least those who want to write to be read) to shorten their work.
Hmmm. Saying that, I realize that it may only apply to internet writing (posts, articles, comments and such), novelists and other long form writing may be exempt because conveying info is not the primary goal. Something like this.
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I've been reading a lot of Roald Dahl books to my kids. He doesn't write poetry (well, he does, but I don't mean his silly diddies and stuff). He is a good writer, but he is writing something different than poetry. Matilda or BFG are amazing cases of clean, concise, maybe perfect prose that is not poetry.
...but I think I may see your point. I can tell you what Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is about in a few phrases. I probably need more words than are in the poem to tell you what "We like March" is about.1
Maybe un-summarizable isn't the right word. I want something that gets at this idea that we could defy the AI summary requesters, stymie them and compelled them to read the real thing if they want to get it.
Footnotes
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Also, to my shame, I'm not much of a poetry reader. I read almost anything that comes in lines that go all the way across the page. ↩
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