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arduanikatoday at 7:57 PM1 replyview on HN

Kept out of sight in this dismissive comment is the pressing question: What year is it?

Up until four years ago, your notion of "what's necessary" was the law of the land. Starting from sometime around Hemingway, we produced a century's worth of flattened, easy-reading slop, and much knowledge was shared very widely. There was a certain art to the blandness. (One notable master of that art is pg, the creator of this website.)

Then we fed that slop into a giant machine that makes it trivial for anyone and everyone to produce that sort of generic writing. If you want to change minds and differentiate yourself now, you can't just do the old flat style anymore. You have to set yourself apart somehow, and you can start by loving the craft of writing again.

The people who matter will read it and love it. Everybody else can take what you wrote, dump it into the slop machine, and rearrange it into something they find easier to read.


Replies

djraytoday at 9:19 PM

One would hope that you change minds and differentiate yourself through the strength of your argument, rather than the anfractuosity of your prose or a propensity for sesquipedalian verbiage.

Clarity does not equate to genericity. I am regularly struck by clear writing that is both lucid and powerful without resorting to ten-dollar words or tortured syntax.

The fact that AI text is often so easily spotted is a clear sign that so-called 'slop' is not the same as a writing style focused on brevity and understanding over florid meanderings.