Informal or conversational tone has always been the gold-standard for most communications. People just piss on it because they like to feel smart.

But, most writing has purpose. And usually fulfilling that purpose requires readers to comprehend what you're writing. Conversational tone is easy to comprehend, and shockingly less ambiguous than you'd think, especially when tailored to the target audience.

>research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.

Obviously no errors Vs no obvious errors, in a nutshell.

> On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.

I often find that to be true. Another important factor is that research skill is correlated with writing skill. Someone who's at the top of their field is likely to be talented in other ways, too, and one such talented is making complex topics easier to understand.

>Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.

Isn’t this a bit short sighted? So if someone has a wide vocabulary and uses proper grammar, you mistrust them by default?

> Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human

Except that this signal is now being abused. People add into the prompts requesting a few typos. And requesting an informal style.

There was a guy complaining about AI generated comments on substack, where the guy had noticed the pattern of spelling mistakes in the AI responses. It is common enough now.

But yes, typos do match the writer - you can still notice certain mistakes that a human might make that an AI wouldn't generate. Humans are good at catching certain errors but not others, so there is a large bias in the mistakes they miss. And keyboard typos are different from touch autoincorrection. AI generated typos have their own flavour.

A friend of mine (non-native English speaker) said she's been talking to a guy (also non-native) on a dating app. She said he was very articulate and showed me some screenshots.

One sentence he sent was "Family is paramount for you.". I told her "I bet you he's using ChatGPT"..

> It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.

But... you know that this moment will be so fleeting as one can trivially generate mistakes to look human.

Have you actually read a research paper, ever?

They are FILLED with jargon (that just as easily could be an ordinary English word instead) ... and giant paragraphs made up of ten sentences all combined into one with semi-colons ... and with all sorts of other butchering of the English language.

Scientific research papers follow their own grammar, which is specific to the research community ... and that grammar is atrocious!

If this becomes the prevailing inclination amongst most readers, Janan Ganesh (one of my most favorite commentators anywhere) at the Financial Times will have a dim professional future.

Muddying the water to make it seem deep.

>On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences

That's because it's their PhDs that did the actual work...