What's Standard English? Part 1: Overview

It's getting harder to decide what is Standard English today. The global view of this topic is that Standard English is British English, taught throughout Europe, Africa, Australia, and most of the Asia and the English-speaking Caribbean, while American English is taught in the United States, some of Asia, South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm considering what we practice around the world as opposed to what we learned was proper English. In the business world, writers are pushing back against what constitutes a correct sentence, acceptable diction, and customary punctuation. I see comma splices especially becoming commonplace, writers assigning new meanings to everyday words, and new words not only flooding emails but pouring into dictionaries as acceptable usage. I'm beginning to see more violations of the norm than the norm. If that's true, then aren't the violations the norm? 

In this series, I will explore writing "standards" that most people ignore, whether they are driven by factors such as stylistic preferences, time constraints, or globalization and technology. 

GenAI Summit Is Coming Soon

Providing financial services that educate the customer is a desired outcome of all banks, but when does that education slide into information overload? How does a financial advisor strike the delicate balance between exuding customer-centered transparency while still maintaining legally required client confidentiality? When does the unyielding due diligence required of financial analysis depart from reasonable flexibility? These questions have been challenging the industry since First Bank opened in 1791 during the George Washington Administration. 

Multiply these concerns by infinity because of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)! Sure, you can bet your assets that GenAI will be always more efficient, usually more comprehensive, and occasionally more rigorous than the best human researcher. But the problems GenAI poses, from downright refusing information requests to generating hallucinations, or seemingly credible lies, lays a crucible on the industry unlike any other.

The response to these conundrums is not easy, but you've got to start somewhere. A smart launching point would be the all-day AI in Banking Summit, presented by OnCourseLearning, on Wednesday, June 3, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. During that time, speakers (including me) will deliver six presentations ranging from 30 to 45 minutes over five hours on a wide range of topics merging banking concerns with the powerful, transformative force of GenAI. Do not miss it. You can register here.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 7: Concerns

The last six posts covered general and specific concerns about depending on AI throughout the writing process. Do I find AI useful to plan, draft, revise, edit, and proofread? Yes. Do I trust AI completely? No. The previous posts explain why. 

In closing this series, I share insights based on AI research in business, law, science, psychology, and medicine to summarize the state of AI in the work world.

Benefits

Undoubtedly, AI provides at least four immediate benefits to users:

• Expanded content. AI possesses an unmatched capacity to capture information on any imaginable topic from a vast range of global databases. A researcher can then ask for AI to organize this data into manageable chunks if it already has not.
• Increased speed. AI retrieves data at a remarkably fast pace that a human being cannot. What takes the savviest researcher hours, days, or weeks to collect takes AI seconds.
• Enhanced quality. AI writes well enough in virtually every orthographic language. This quality check closes the articulation gap between nonnative writers of a language and their more fluent counterparts.
• Broadened scrutiny. AI efficiently uncovers plagiarism. Such a feature is invaluable for teachers, editors, and proprietary businesspeople in assigning original work.

Concerns

Every research article I have read about AI has concluded that the writer must beware of many issues, five of which I mention here:

• Credibility. We may get from AI contrived, imprecise, or unreliable information. Therefore, we must verify content we get from multiple, reliable sources.
• Originality. Nothing from AI is original, and though it provides sources from where it gathered material, it might not be citing the primary source. This task has always been the researcher's job and continues to be. 
• Transparency. Despite AI programmers' best efforts, AI at times does not provide sources, challenging writers to investigate the source material for themselves.
• Accessibility. AI may provide information that is nearly impossible or impractical to trace. This dilemma forces writers to practice the old adage from journalism: When in doubt, leave it out.
• Compliance. While AI has been around for a few years, it is still a new technology that has left a lot of organizations deciding on how to best use it. In some places, using it equates to an unethical breach of company policy, so writers should know the organizational policy. 

As I wrote in "Using AI to Improve Writing Creativity, Productivity, and Quality," writers must remember that they are the boss and AI is just their assistant.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 6: Proofreading

As of now, AI is better at proofreading than it is at editing, with a caveat. In distinguishing between editing and proofreading, you can use as an example having written in first draft:

Evlyn impacted me.

When editing, you focus on command of language. In this case, you decide to change the verb impacted:

Evlyn affected me.

When proofreading, you search for overlooked errors, such as spacing, font, spelling, and number inconsistencies. Here you pick up the spelling error Evlyn:

Evelyn affected me.

AI ensures you spell, capitalize, and punctuate properly. You can also count on AI to make every sentence comply with standard grammar rules. Your typos now are less tolerable since you have AI to run a quick check for you before pressing send. 

But beware! AI loses its effectiveness for various reasons, some programmatic and some bandwidth. I recently prompted it to "Proofread only for overlooked errors without changing the content" of a third draft that AI and I collaborated on. It responded that the draft was error-free yet reverted to an earlier draft. Clearly, AI and I have a different definition of proofread. Also, it might have been suffering from information overload because of the multiple drafts we covered. In addition, here are four proofreading points it did not detect:

• Repetitive phrasing. One of my sentences read Effective immediately, a one-year lease a $90 per square foot is available immediately. AI did not report the repetitive opening and closing phrases.
• Spelling inconsistencies. I mistakenly included alternate spellings of smartboard and smart board in the same document, which AI did not call out.
• Number-letter spacing. I inserted a phone number without a space on either side of two words, at732-718-3361to, which AI ignored.
• Spacing inconsistencies. I drop only one space after a period, but I inadvertently double spaced after one sentence in a document of about 20 sentences. While I do well at revising and editing, proofreading is my biggest weakness in the quality control phase of the writing process. Luckily, I saw this error, which AI overlooked.

Once again, the theme of this series has been not to get lazy. The final look of your draft is on you, not AI.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 5: Editing

The average business or technical writer does not tend toward deep research and practice in rhetorical theory when editing. But those who do not know a sentence from a citrus fruit or a punctuation mark from a pumpkin would do well to ask AI to edit their messages before pressing send.

AI will not let you down when it comes to writing grammatically flawless sentences. It usually knows where periods and commas go, and it can help you to achieve plain language, if that's what you're aiming for. Enough research shows that AI can close the gap between limited English proficient writers and their native English-speaking counterparts. 

But grammatical propriety ain't everything. I wouldn't depend too much on AI for three critical areas of writing: style, tone, and content.

Style. You might prefer writing in a certain style, for instance, exclusively using active or passive voice. If you are an informed writer, you can dictate these stylistic wishes to AI, but you won't get something that seems like your style. 

Tone. While AI is quite good in writing proper sentences, it is weak in determining the proper tone based on your audience and the business situation. You will have to figure that out on your own based on your professional experience and situational awareness.

Content. Whenever I ask AI to edit a passage for me, it overreaches. For instance, I recently asked it to edit a passage for plain language. It changed the word permanent to for a long time. There is a difference in meaning, which AI is still inadequate in detecting. 

You'll have to detemine whether AI is doing the right thing. Only you know what you really want to say. Don't let AI take over the writing situation completely.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 4: Revising

After drafting a rough copy of a business-critical document for a broad audience, a wise writer would run it through three rewriting steps: revising, editing, and proofreading. In short, when revising, we consider the content itself and the structure. Editing requires us to look at the fluency, clarity, and conciseness of the sentences; the word choice, punctuation, and spelling; and usage rules, such as capitalization, abbreviation, and numeration. During the proofreading step, we search for overlooked errors, such as typographical errors, spacing inconsistencies, and font irregularities. This post focuses on AI's effectiveness in revision.

We hear the word editor and proofreader much more than we hear the word reviser. When I use the word, many people will ask me, "Is there such a word?" It's just as well that we don't use the word much. An editor can edit someone else's manuscript, and the same goes for a proofreader. The fresh eyes of an editor and proofreader can detect opportunities to improve the quality of the language or fix mistakes. But writers should revise because only the writers know what they're trying to get across. They know the story they're trying to tell. Writers should know better than anyone else what information should be deleted, moved, or added to get their point across.

For this reason, I would not recommend AI to skilled writers for revising. They should know the content that goes into their message. For instance, if you were to write an accident investigation, you might think that a chronological approach would work. You would mention the cause of the accident and then the effect, followed by the response and mitigation plan. But skilled writers know the most important pointsto start with are the human and property damage. AI would know all of this, of course, so it would be useful to novice accident investigators. Moreover, most organizations require investigators to use a prescribed template for accidents, so using AI may be pointless.

But AI can give good revision advice if, after writing an internal proposal or evaluation report, you ask it questions like, "Should I delete anything? What should I add? Is the order of ideas all right?" It will give you helpful ideas to consider. As long as you remember that you, not AI, are in charge, you will find it useful during the revision step.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 3: Drafting

The last post suggested that planning is all about creativity. This post is about drafting, which concerns productivity. Of course, creativity is involved in drafting, but efficient writers know a rough draft is all they need to shape the message to its finished form. Speed is paramount.

A lot can go wrong when using AI during the drafting step of the writing process. You might direct your AI assistant to create a first draft of the complete document based on the plan that it generated and you tweaked, only to get something entirely different, or with little more substance, or with off-point content, or a rearranged story line depending on the words you choose in your prompt. Sometimes AI can kill your forward progress. That's why you should save every version of your document.   

Lessons Learned:

• Master the prompt. Language variables are infinite. The slightest change in a prompt can yield entirely different results than expected. Make note of your prompts to adjust them when you do not get what you want.
• Seek output, not perfection. This tip is a general one regardless of whether you use AI. I subscribe to the adage "less is more," but not during the first draft. Completeness first, conciseness second. Make sure you get all your need for the quality control phase of writing. 
• Provide sufficient context to humanize the message. Create a style that sounds like you, not a machine. Reading aloud your writing, or AI's generated content, will help you gain a fluent voice during the editing step.

You always write the first draft for yourself; you revise, edit, and proofread for your target audience. These quality control steps are the focus of the next three posts.