The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer

aetherspawn

Woah. Reading this blog post was like being transported 5 years back prior to the existence of AI. It reeks of pure humanity.

SunOrbiter1

"To which I say this: fuck you, you’re not too busy." What's with the abuse? Is that the hallmark of a great writer as well? Fuck this, fuck that. Pathetic. That said, good advice. Mediocre readers are mediocre writers. The reverse is not necessarily true. I've met many fantasy writers (hello Readercon!) who've read every damn series and then proceed to write yet another Tolkienesque knockoff. Their brains are pretty much like overtrained LLMs.

wcfrobert

Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in. This unfortunately does not bode well for my writing as I read emails, teams messages, Claude output, and compliance documents all day. I'm sure my writing voice will trend towards sounding like AI along with other annoying ticks like "shall", "need not", "take no exception", etc. My hypothesis is engineers will suck at writing by default unless they do extra-curricular reading. I read a lot! But sadly it's usually textbooks, journal papers, documentations, and Claude. I'm envious of great writers, but I don't have time to read Keats. I'm immersed in Stewart, Strang, and whatever Claude is feeding me next.