AI has suddenly entered our lives. I remember sitting in on an AI class back in the late 1980s, and being lost in the mathematics. When I interviewed at Universities in 1987 I remember either Reading or Leicester had an image recognition system that was watching for busses, turning traffic lights green for them. It was alwasy something evolving, in the background.
AI has always been there in fiction as long as I’ve been around. Yeah, Skynet seems to be the most talked about, but even before Terminator was released I was aware of AI. I’d seen the classics of Westworld, Demon Seed, Collosus – The Forbin Project, 2001 and many others.
Trying out AI
For about a year, I’ve been flirting with AI tools to assist me. I’ve played with Bard and ChatGPT. I have used CoPilot. There are other places where it shows up, here on WordPress, to create the “Excerpt” for posts. It actually writes an introductory summary paragraph. I’ve had mixed success, and it took me time to learn how to use them.
After a beer or two, especially with old college friends, my English slips back into a mixed Northern dialect. You don’t want too raw a version of that for a blog post, and definitely not in a Wiki article. I have been using Grammarly and ChatGPT to help me with that. When I say help, sometimes it feels like I fight them through the process. I added a new one to the mix today; someone has set up a ChatGPT for Microsoft Style.
ChatGPT as a writing mentor – readbility and cursory fact checking
ChatGPT 4.0 in itself was easy to configure. I asked it for a professional but conversational tone, and to allow my Britishness to show, without getting in the way. I can make it talk Mancunian or Scouse, but I don’t want to confuse anyone.
ChatGPT can straighten out my rambling sentences, but it sometimes uses more flowery diction than I would. It’s meant to be “engaging”, but at times it feels pretentious. Sometimes, I’ve struggled with a paragraph so much that I punted it to my AI buddy to write, then I will edit back to my voice. That really helps me get concepts in a logical order rather than butterflying around.
I compose text, then I get ChatGPT to spot factual errors. It catches me on omissions quite well and sometimes calls me out on details. Normally, I am writing about what I know or something I’ve just learnt, so facts are mostly right first time. Filling knowledge gaps is something ChatGPT can do.
Chat will also help with readability. It will suggest better phrasing. Sometimes it will get things wrong. I can’t trust it to be right, but much as a typewriter can straighten out wonky handwriting, and a word processor allows fixing a line rather than needing a whole page re-typing, the AI can help me rephrase, bulk out, or trim down text. It’s a tool that works well, but you have to keep an eye on it. ChatGPT is a classmate who quickly reads your paper and nudges you the right way.
Grammarly as a strict grammarian – Punctuation correct. Nouns and verbs in order.
I then throw the paragraphs into Grammarly. Grammarly is a lot stricter on grammar. I like it, as hyphens, semi-colons, Oxford commas, and the like are generally confusing, even to word-processor software. It seems like every tool I use was taught a different grammar. It doesn’t help when I bounce between tools configured in English and American English or even switching the tools mode based on who I am writing to. Grammarly will often fix ChatGPT’s grammar, even when I have the same language and dialect set on both tools. That’s okay; one is a parser and rules checker, the other guesses at a paragraph and checks a probability score to decide if it was right. I defer to Grammarly.
Grammarly for readability – Engaging, comprehensible, staid.
Grammarly, as I have it set up, is trying to help me expresss myself in a clear, confident, professional, engaging, non-ableist… If you know your way around a pipe-organ, I’ve “pullled out all the stops”. I have almost every helper turned on. This is where the fight begins.
After Chat’s review, once I see it as readable, I give it to Grammarly. As I said, great grammar checker. It helps give a polished finish. I used to use Word, with grammar tools that showed what mistakes you had, but not what fixes are needed. Grammarly shows the fix, indeed fixes if you have options. Maybe Word and Pages are better now, but I mostly write wiki content under Confluence, or READMEs in GitHub, so am writing in markdown. I will do this through browser portals, or IDEs (Intrgrated Development Environment) like Visual Studio or Slick Edit, good editors, but not always the best dictionaries or grammar checkers.
I write a lot of engineering related documentation. There are many keywords and some phrasing that will trip Grammarly up. This mostly happens when a keyword looks like a regular English word, but is some acronym, or domain specific usage. It will try to make word plural, or mistake nouns for verbs. It doesn’t happen often, only 2-3 times per document.
The bigger problem is how grammarly looks at readability. When I did “creative writing” at school, we were taught that “repetition is bad”. Repetition is bad. If you can’t think of a synonym, then you reach for you thesaurus and get a word that suits your mood. Otherwise, well you sound like a monosyllabic oaf who learnt to read from the newspapers their fish and chips were wrapped in. (Trust me, that’s a UK reference, and an example of what not to put in a technical document).
Back to the thesaurus; Grammarly will take a perfectly good sentence and try to fix it. Say I was describing project management within an IDE. I would talk about the project file and I would tell you to select new project and I might even tell you that you could reload saved projects. Now, my $10 per month writing assistant would see that repetition, and try to get me to use “design”, “chore” or “mission”. Sure, if my project was adding ditchlights to my off-roader, then I would welcome, even embrace these enhancements. Project is definitely a special word in the context of IDE, meaning a collection of files used toghether.
I had a meandering sentence (actually, this has happened thrice to date) where, in shortening the offending phrase, Grammarly managed to invert the sense, taking a positive and making it negative. This was the worst I’ve seen, but happens infrequently enough that I still use the tool.
Grammarly, as I have it configured, seems to value brevity. It trys to take out words that I had added for weight an emphsis. I would say removing emphasis really removes the humanity of the prose, Grammarly would counter “Removing emphasis lesses the humanity of the text.” The removing of nuance, emphasis and color seems to flatten all my text to a generic bland, but not a clean technical style.
Maybe I can tweak the settings to relax this, but I can’t see easy ways to switch writing contexts.
ChatGPT for Microsoft Style Guide – Just what the doc`er ordered
Now today I was juggling if I needed to do better than follow the Google guidelines for technical writing. I think I can. Microsoft has an good style that allows articles to be less formal. I remember from my childhood a the Campain for Plain English, mostly targetting “small print” legalese, it appealed to my working class parents and peers. The Microsoft Style seems to also lean into approchable writing. I love their concept of Write Like You Speak.
Finding a style guide does not mean you can follow it. I sometimes feel like we got short changed in my English Language classes, I only remember three tenses, past, present and future. My past is definitely imperfect, but I didn’t know there was a tense for that. I need a tool that can act as a rules checker for me.
I found such a tool. And my first attempt with it left me with great confidence and dread. I took a paragraph ChatGPT had helped me color a few weeks ago, and gave it to ChatGPT for Microsoft Style to see what I would get. Where ChatGPT had goaded me to use richer text, this new checker stripped it back almost barer than my original.
“Horses for courses” – my conclusion, for now
I really liked the cleanliness of the Microsoft Style, but I know that I will reserve it for my technical content.
I’ll stick with my ChatGPT for blogs, rants and raves. It keeps me honest, but lets me play still.
I’ll tune down Grammarly’s invasiveness, making it rules checker. Sure it’s tone analysis is good, but I don’t want it fighting my other tools for readability. So many options, it’ll take time to tune it well.
As always, personal letters will be hand penned, with crossings out, illegible scrawl, and occasional coffee augmentations where the mug dripped.
Note about tools used for this blog post.
For this post I used
- the built in spell checker for WordPress/Safari.
- DuckDuckGo in Safari to search for background information.
- No AI assistant was used in content generation, review or edit.
Note about the photo.
“Bad Day at the Coffee Shop” by Alex O’Donnell, Aug 2019.
We all use various tools for writing. One of my favourites was a Parker Vector, normally loaded with Royal Blue. It was my favourite, and it still lives in the writing case in my backpack. The other is a Faber-Castell, it’s a bit too chunky for the writing case, but it has a smoother action than the Parker. It is normally loaded with königsblau ink.
You can imagine my frustration when I discovered I got to the coffee shop, ready to write a letter to my dad, only to find I had no ink with me.
Glorified Plumbing 