Like the original Grammarly, I think this can be useful for business writing because these tools help you get to the point. Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays, but if you're composing an email or writing a design doc, just optimize for reading time and clarity.

But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such as "crucial". It's that most LLM articles on LinkedIn or on personal blogs just take a one-sentence prompt and dress it up into a lot of pointless words, wasting everyone's time: "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be far fewer of them?

On the flip side, if you're a human and actually have something of consequence to say, "delve" all you want.

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danilocesar an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I've heard this theory in the past:

In a couple of years, the corporative communication will work like this:

You write a bunch of bullet points and feed them to an AI to create a beautiful and well written email. Your reader will feed that email into his own AI and he will generate bullet points to read.

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Swizec 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?

Always judge an author by the length of their text.

Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.

Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Always judge an author by the length of their text.

Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.

Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.

	▲	abustamam 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tangential but it kinda irks me when people just put their initials when signing off on an email. It seems like unnecessary brevity in a world where you can type your name once in your emails signature line and never worry about typing it again.

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ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So it’s really about the content; not the metrics.

My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.

She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.

French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.

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grahamplace 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As the saying goes: “If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter”

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littlexsparkee 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So many books that could've been an article. I try to save myself time by checking Goodreads but it's not always clear as I'm more critical than the average person. Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off. Appreciate that lately new books are sometimes featured in pubs with an excerpt.

	▲	alfiedotwtf 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There’s an interesting thought! For hundreds of years there have been incentives (money) to publish books, and yet in 2026 we still haven’t worked out how to monetarily incentivise authors of single articles without bundling them with articles or other authors you wouldn’t read (because you only care about a single article damnit

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card_zero 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So, not in fact the length of the text, which is constant at 200 pages.

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tombert 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Tangential, but I remember when I was studying for the ACT, there was something in one of the practice books that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "Good writing is clear and easy to understand. It's about communication, make sure you communicate".

It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.

	▲	teddyh 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I recommend <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM>, Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively.

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lokar 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a senior engineer I spend a lot of time reviewing and approving technical designs, PRDs etc.

Over the years the amount of basic copy editing I have to do has really grown. I sometimes feel like I’m removing 20%+ of the text. And that was before LLMs.

	▲	abustamam 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For better or for worse my team has standardized on using Miro for technical designs and diagrams. It's a lot easier to visualize the system in a diagram than it is to talk about it in prose. I think it's important to choose the right medium for communication though. Some things just need to be written out concisely.

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edaemon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, this comic summarizes the issue pretty well: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

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slopinthebag 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays

Not to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).

Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)

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flexagoon 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In uni, maybe. But my experience in middle/high school was that hitting the minimum word count was much more important than actually good writing.

	▲	abustamam 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The concept of word count in high school was bonkers. Knowing my teacher wouldn't check, I wrote a dense line with a lot of words, using small print and small words, and then used that as my baseline (so let's say it had 20 words). Then if I needed 200 words total I'd write ten lines, knowing full well that other lines of text would only have 10-15 words. Cheating? Maybe. But it's a silly metric to begin with, and obviously the teacher didn't actually care about the count because I got an A in most of my essays.

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Teever 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Flowery language is important but something like BLUF - Bottom Line Upfront[0] is important too.

While it's important for universities to continue to teach the ability to write using 'flowery' language I think that it is also important that schools teach students something like BLUF -- Bottom Line Upfront.[0]

Compare and contrast those two sentences. I'm fine writing a comment that us just the first sentence and the link without a footnote but I know as a message it won't go over well on a site like Hackernews. They looooooove their verbosity here.

So in some situations you have to gussy it up -- give it some of that Emeril "BAM". The deal is that you have to know your audience. The medium is the message.[1] shit like that.

Stuff on Linkedin is full of pointless words because that's what Linkedin is for -- it's about signalling to other people that you can string together a bunch of pointless words that are effusive and vaguely passive aggressive at the same time -- you know, typical business shit.

“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”

We can delve into this kinda stuff but really it just comes back to the know your audience and that the medium is the message. Also don't repeat your self.

Definitely don't repeat yourself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

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jollyllama 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>The problem is not X. It's Y.

Your writing style, if not your thoughts, have already been infected by LLM prose.

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chromacity 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No. I've been using that construct long before LLMs and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It allows you to succinctly state the position you're disagreeing with before putting forward another hypothesis. LLMs overuse it for needless emphasis, with the negative example usually reduced to a single word.

	▲	jollyllama 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's never been so prevalent as now, it's everywhere. I didn't mean any of this as a bad faith thing, it genuinely is changing how people think, speak, etc. Also, I don't consider hedging or defensive writing or negative definitions succinct (it's not a wall of text, granted) and in ordinary times it did indeed have its place. Edit: I would add that you literally followed the formula in every respect except for a single word, and IMO LLMs are already changing to avoid the single-word formulation.

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UqWBcuFx6NV4r 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anyone over the age of 25 actually developed their writing style before ChatGPT came about. Getting all uppity about these surface-level LLM ‘tropes’ is just stupid. I am thankfully yet to run into a situation where someone with this attitude is actually in a position to be able to negatively affect my life. I’m sure that there’s a correlation. Take the “ew, em-dash” stuff back to Twitter.

	▲	mech422 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah - writing styles have really changed over the years. Last time I ran a business document thru Grammarly, I was told it wasn't written at a 6(8?) grade level and was too complex :-P When I first started out, I was taught you use passive voice in proposals (eg 'a program will be written..' not 'I will write a program...') since you didn't know who was actually going to write it. I can't imagine how that would go over now...

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tom_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This doesn't apply here - I don't think? The article claims X; so it is surely no sin for the post rebutting it to straight up state that X is, in fact, not the case.

The LLM tic, by contrast, has a noticeable tendency to be deployed even when X has never been previously mentioned. It is a valid rhetorical technique, and I assume that's why the LLMs have picked up on it - but it has to be deployed judiciously. Which is something LLMs appear absolutely incapable of doing. And that is why people notice it, and think it sucks.

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sdthjbvuiiijbb 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nonsense. It's a common construction that LLMs didn't exactly invent. I don't think their usage evokes LLM writing at all (not short and punchy enough).

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comex 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just because LLMs overuse it doesn't mean it doesn't have its place.

The way the OP used the 'not X, but Y' pattern, the 'X' and 'Y' are two clear, specific, and (most importantly) distinct things, as opposed to stereotypical LLM usage where they're vague characterizations or metaphors. And there's a reason to emphasize that it's not X, because the Slop Cop website implicitly suggests that it is X.