P2P No. 55 — Writing advice from Benjamin Franklin and the modern Hemingway
Mentors for better writing
When you start something, the best you can do is copy those ahead of you.
But it's not mindless copy-paste but deliberate practice. Benjamin Franklin dissected articles from the Spectator to improve his style. You can also use dead or far-away writers as your mentors. Nonetheless, this is a one-way street: you do not get explicit feedback.
This is what Hemingway can help with. I will not tell you about a secret technology to resurrect long-dead writers to be on your beck and call. It's not that Hemingway, but the Hemingway app. The color coding highlights weak areas (passive, complex sentences), whereas the assigned grade level is a sanity check for readability.
I am skeptical about tools that make you think less.
The tools I like are akin to mentors: they give feedback.
Tools
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P2P No. 30 — Imitation Learning
Unless you are the genius of this millennium, chances are high that your goal is something someone already did before. Nonetheless, we often delude ourselves by thinking that “no one did this thing before” and that “we are the ones who need to figure out how to get there.”
P2P No. 34 — On AI-based tools for writing
Recent months stirred up the landscape of human-generated content, from images to presentations to text. Recently, I came across a Twitter thread about AI-based tools generating fantasy novels. My colleague’s (whose quips are always epic) tweet: Sure, you do not want to write the umpteenth motivation letter or memo. But as there is more to art than the …