They are great writers if you tell them what you want. If you're unable to properly articulate the writing style you would like as you would a software spec, well, garbage in, garbage out.
Are there any skills or publicly available repos that do what you claim here? I would love to learn to have it write better.
For me, my amateur attempt is having another LLM do a review loop to remove clearly offending phrases and a heuristic eval to change sentence structures to be more similar to mine, THEN my manual HITL loop to rewrite ~20% of the sentences anyway.
That's not fair. To most users this would not be an obvious thing to do, unlike software/scientific/analytic uses of LLMs.
So it's not a matter of inability but rather awareness and know-how.
Then secondly, humans learn to write intuitively and heuristically (for example "paragraphs should align sentence subjects with an identifiable flow of conceptual main characters/actors" is an entire chapter of expert writing advice traditionally taught at the undergrad level). The act and teaching the act are different beasts. The way to specify would have no objective, clear best practice to do so: Even an English teacher or a language expert would be challenged to come up with a concise list of instructions to set up an LLM to output something of sufficient quality.
What do you suggest for articulating the writing style that one wants from LLMs?
I’ve been experimenting with having LLMs write/update academic notebooks for me, and so far the best results I’ve gotten came from correcting their output and asking them what they’ve “learned” from my feedback.