Useful Articles for Developing Writers

I have been getting a lot of requests for online reading material on writing improvement. My answer is usually, "Just search 'writing skills at work' or 'how to improve work-related writing,' or a thousand other variations of those prompts." I also mention this blog, WORDS ON THE LINE, which has been recommending numerous helpful sources over the past 21 years. Here are three solid advice pieces, previously unmentioned on this blog: 

1. An Indeed article, "11 Ways to Improve Your Writing (with Examples)," offers the usual, but still valuable, tips on purposefulness, content development, formatting, voice, and other stylistic devices.  
2. "How to Improve Your Writing Skills at Work" by Etelka Lehoczky on the Forbes website goes a bit more off the beaten path. This brief primer proves a correlation between confidence and efficiency.
3. The Articulate Marketing website suggests positive and proactive practices in "Concentration: 22 Ways to Help You Focus on Writing." It serves several off-beat tips to spark creativity and sharpen focus that just might work for you. 

You can also browse WORDS ON THE LINE for topics such as the six-part series on writing confidence, an eight-part series on summarizing successfully, a seven-part series on reading for writers, and hundreds of other posts on writing best practices.

Watch What You Say to AI

What I might have mistaken for Artificial Intelligence's sense of humor is, in fact, its inability to infer. Wait wait: AI cannot have a sense of humor. What was I thinking? 

Seduced by AI

AI's casual responses to my requests ("Sure thing! . . . Certainly! . . .  Of course!") had me fooled for a moment. I suppose I was like Theodore Twombly, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, in the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her, who falls in love with Samantha, his computer's operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, only to feel cheated when he later realizes that thousands of lonely men like him are also infatuated by their own Samantha. The only difference between what was happening to Theodore and me is that is that operating systems will not go away as gracefully as Samantha does. They are here to stay. Happy ending or not?

Two Sides to Everything

The answer to that question depends on your perspective. Every technology offers huge benefits and equally big risks. A car gets you to places faster, but crazy drivers are out there to threaten your life and property. X-rays give our doctors a clear look at our internal maladies, but too much exposure to radiation may leave us with cancer. We now have every bit of essential information about ourselves on a convenient handheld phone, but that device is so easy to lose or be stolen. 

I recently designed a course, Using AI as Your Writing Assistant, with AI's help through each step of the writing process: planning drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. In seconds, it gave me content that would have taken me much more time to create independently. Yet much of it was excessive or irrelevant, and some of it was misinformation, and only an experienced human being would know that its content was lacking in places. This experience made me think about people who are swearing by the perfection of AI. They fail to see that AI is not a content creator but a lightning-fast data regurgitator.

It's on You

The lesson learned is to remember that we are still accountable for what we write. We can't say, "AI made me do it." Remember who's the boss. Here are three tips to stay in charge:

1. Use specific prompts. If you want to write a fundraising letter about a trip to Cooperstown for your son's Little League team trip, don't tell AI, "Write a fundraising letter for my son's Little League team." Even "Write a fundraising letter for my son's Little League team's trip" is not enough. Start with, "Write a fundraising letter for a Little League team's trip to Cooperstown's Major League Baseball Hall of Fame." You'll see better results, but you'll still have an editing job on your hands for greater relevance.

2. Research what you get. When asking AI for hard data, seek multiple sources. Say you want to write about the economy of your region. You prompt AI to provide the local inflation, unemployment, and cost-of-living, and interest rates. Compare what it gives you to what other sources say. I recently compared what AI said was the consumer price index according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics with actual U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To AI's, credit, it provided multiple sources at the end of its data analysis. But the federal agency itself offered more context. My further research strengthened my knowledge with deeper insights into the economic indicators.

3. Save every copy. In case you're using AI at multiple points in the development of a document, saving every copy as "Draft 1," "Draft 2," and so on will ensure that you don't lose anything. AI can get heavy handed in reviewing work, decimating all you and it had created to that point. If this happens, you'll be able to revert to an earlier draft and abandon AI, or you can start a fresh dialogue with AI with your preferred draft.     

 

Taking these simple steps will ensure you, and not AI, are the master of your destiny.

On Revenge, Part 3

This final segment on revenge comes with a disclosure about my motivation for this three-part series. Someone I love, someone I have known for 25 years, since they were 7 and I was 47, someone I have done much for in their life, offended me deeply in a well-crafted, detailed, acerbic text message days before one of the biggest milestones of their life. (I use the gender-neutral pronouns they, them, and their to conceal their identity.) I was so deeply insulted by their comments that I was too stunned to respond or to talk even to my wife, daughters, or closest friends about the attack. Anyone who knows me would say my reaction was uncharacteristic. I typically do not hestitate to express my feelings, except for when my expression might ge hurtful to someone. Many thoughts swirled through my head, foremost that we humans tend to hurt most and express anger most to those we love most. I knew they loved me too. I did not respond to their message. Although they followed up with an attempt to apologize, I could see that their words were self-righteous and self-justifying, with no real sense of accountability for their comments. I teach adults how to apologize in speech and in writing, and this person I love so much failed abysmally in doing so. I expected better from a 32-year-old.

Days later, I shared the message with my wife, who can be more forgiving that I in some situations. She was outraged that this person would write such a blistering invective about me. She suggested that I stop communicating with them. But this was not an option for me. I still loved them. Their directing such venom toward me was clearly motivated by a problem they were having with someone else. On the day of that person's milestone, I wished them well. I could have said so much about their own shortcomings, but to what end? I could have said that in writing such a trenchant, negative message, they were behaving worse than the people who were offending them. But what good would that do? 

Please read my two previous posts on revenge, the one about Taha Muhammad Ali's poem "Revenge," which imagines an offense far worse than any pain I could imagine, and the one about what masters say about revenge. Both pieces confirm that the greatest manifestation of power is restraint. More than two weeks after the offense, I am still hurting. Yet I find great solace in the words of these healers. My ability to read has saved my soul—and others pain—more than once. 

On Revenge, Part 2

Following up on last week's post about Taha Muhammad Ali's poem "Revenge," I wonder whether Ali found inspiration in his poem from Marcus Aurelius, who wrote nearly two millennia earlier in Meditations, Chapter 6, Part 6:

The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the the wrongdoer.

And then, maybe Aurelius was influenced by the Bible, specifically Romans, 12:19:

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay," says the Lord.

Or perhaps Aurelius somehow got his hands on Buddhist precepts, which view revenge as poisonous and self-destructive, worsening the problem rather than mitigating it. The key is understanding that the wrongdoer is also suffering. Khalil Gubran and Mahatma Gandhi were credited with saying, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." Even Frank Sinatra's more self-centered viewpoint, "The best revenge is massive success," is better than seeking to heap violence upon those who hurt us.

It's one thing to say revenge is a misdeed, another to practice it. What does it require? Self-control. Restraint. Love. 

   

On Revenge, Part 1

WORDS ON THE LINE presents a series on revenge in its many manifestations, starting with the poem "Revenge" by Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011). I heard Ali read this poem on Friday, September 29, 2006, at the eleventh Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, then in Waterloo Village, Stanhope, New Jersey. 

After hearing that short poem live twenty years ago, and reading it many times since, I have become convinced that the word revenge, as well as most words in our lexicon, is subject to vast interpretations. The poet posits that revenge need not be an act of violence or any sort of overt retribution, for that matter. Showing mercy to the most hateful criminal can also be an expression of revenge. It evokes Joseph's forgiveness of his brothers after they sold him into slavery, or Valjean's abandoning the opportunity to dispose of his nemesis Javert in Les Miserables.

You can hear the poem in Arabic by Ali and in English by one of his translators, Peter Cole, as I heard it in that moment live here. Please listen.

Knowing Differences

One of my two pens is out of ink, and I've been looking all over for my other pen. I was writing about the differences between people, places, and things with the same name. We humans are remarkable that we can distinguish among them.

I would have started with people. My girlfriend's name is Onyx, and Onyx is the only Onyx I have ever met, so I can't compare her to another Onyx. I could compare her to my last girlfriend, but that's not what I'm after here. I have way too many friends named John. There's John Amato, John Devers, John Edison, John Figueroa, John Hines, John Rodriguez, and John Vanucci. I wouldn't know which two to compare, and if I did, the other five would be offended that I didn't compare them. Come to think of it, the two I'd compare might be pretty upset too. I know only two Steves, Steve Jennings and Steve Wolfson, but their likenesses are far more interesting than their differences. Maybe I'll write about those similarities some other time. And I know two Kims, Kim O'Dell, a man, and Kim Savage, a woman. I'm not in an emotional or intellectual (or political, come to think of it) place where I can describe the differences between a man and a woman except for the obvious biological aspects.

I wanted to compare two Blue Lagoons, the one in Comino, Malta and the one in Grindavik, Iceland. They are entirely different aquatic experiences. And the differences between Broadway in Nashville and Broadway in New York, which are quite different in magnitude and culture. I cannot say much about differences between Georgia in the United States and Georgia in Europe, because I have been to the state but not the country.  I could say a thing or two about Hollywood in California and Hollywood in Florida, but why bother? However, I would enjoy writing about the differences between Neptune, New Jersey and the planet Neptune, even though I have not been to the planet, but there's a story there, only I can't find the other pen. 

As for differences in similarly named things, I am moving too far to the obvious. I could write about the differences between the bow to be tied and the bow of a ship, or the bat to be swung and the bat that flies, or the trunk that stores clothes or the trunk of an elephant, but I'm not writing to first graders. On the other hand, writing about the differences between the cell that a prisoner lives in and the cell that's the smallest unit of an organism would be interesting, I suppose.

Then you have confused nomenclature. Like Madison the person and Madison, Wisconsin, the place.  Or Aurora the person and aurora the thing. Take Wembley, England, the place, and Wembley ice cream, the thing. How can one keep track?

Back to my two pens. I know one is a Cross and one is Parker, but I don't know which one is out of ink and which one is missing because I threw out the dried up one and the trash collectors already picked it up. Maybe when I finally find the missing one, I'll see that I mistakenly threw out the one with ink. At that point, what difference would it make which is a Cross and which a Parker? And anyway, their names are different. So this is all very much beside the point.

I Know Why

I have bought books in City Lights in San Francisco, Foyle's in London, Moe's in Berkeley, Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and Strand in New York, but I cannot recall most of what I have read. I have seen art in the National in Beijing, the Prado in Madrid, the Metropolitan in New York, the Louvre in Paris, and the Vatican in Rome, yet I remain so uneducated about art. I have heard jazz shows in A-Trane in Berlin, Bohemia in Granada, Jazzhus Montmarte in Copenhagen, Stampen in Stockholm, and Yoshi's in Oakland, but I cannot tell you who performed there. I have walked the Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon, Cadillac Mountain Trail in Acadia, Highline Trail in Glacier, Mist Trail in Yosemite, Skyline Trail in Mount Rainier, and if you put me on one of these trails, I would not be able to distinguish it from the others. And you, I have met you in so many places over so many years and talked with you about so many things, and here I am unable to tell you where, when, and what. But I can tell you why. May I see you tomorrow to tell you?