[HN Gopher] My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)
___________________________________________________________________
My PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash (2010)
Author : vismit2000
Score : 234 points
Date : 2024-12-13 09:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (matt.might.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (matt.might.net)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Useful for those who, for some unfathomable reason, don't use
| emacs.
|
| Might be hard to get into a good workflow as running them and
| then re-editing seems tedious.
|
| Author gives credit to emacs "writegood", but my all-time fave
| style-nazi plugin is "artbollocks-mode".
| tetris11 wrote:
| duplicate words: sed -z -r 's|(\b[^
| ]+\b)(\1)+|~Dupe!\1~|g'
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Put "AI" in the name and sell it for $5M?
| mooreds wrote:
| If you are looking for more of this, check out vale.sh. It lets
| you add all kinds of style guidelines, including avoiding weasel
| words.
|
| Here's the GH action we use to run vale on our website at PR
| time: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-
| site/blob/main/.git...
|
| and our config: https://github.com/FusionAuth/fusionauth-
| site/tree/main/conf...
|
| We've found it helpful to enforce style but probably aren't using
| it to the full extent.
| codazoda wrote:
| Vale.sh looks pretty good, thanks for the reference.
|
| I'm currently editing the third edition of my book and a bunch
| of articles for my website. This will come in handy.
| barrettondricka wrote:
| I use a version of these scripts all the time.
|
| though all-in-one spell-checkers like vale.sh are more
| convenient.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| > I'd even go so far as to say that the removal of all adverbs
| from any technical writing would be a net positive . . .
|
| > Bad: We offer a _completely_ different formulation of CFA.
|
| > Better: We offer a different formulation of CFA.
|
| Getting rid of all adverbs (e.g. " _vigorously_ stir the
| solution, " " _monotonically_ increasing function, " "
| _spontaneously_ combustible ") hardly seems wise, whether
| technical writing or not.
| zem wrote:
| even "completely different formulation" could convey something
| different from "different formulation", e.g. "we tweaked the
| method" vs "we scrapped the method and started anew".
|
| I also disagree about the "beholder words"; to me "it was
| surprisingly low" means "I am drawing your attention to the
| fact that the low value surprised me" rather than "you need to
| be surprised by the low value".
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Don't tell the reader how to feel, but rather guide them to
| feel that way through your ideas, results, and conclusions.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| His point isn't to ban surprisingly, it's to prefer 'we the
| authors were surprised it was low' over 'you the reader
| should find it surprisingly low'.
| zem wrote:
| that's my point; to me "the results were surprisingly low"
| _does_ mean "we the authors were surprised it was low",
| and reads better than "to our surprise the results were
| low".
|
| my reasoning is that the former is more of a parenthetical,
| as much as to say "the results were low (and it surprised
| us)", rather than putting the "us" who were surprised front
| and centre and making the low results subordinate to that.
| dogmayor wrote:
| > I also disagree about the "beholder words"; to me "it was
| surprisingly low" means "I am drawing your attention to the
| fact that the low value surprised me" rather than "you need
| to be surprised by the low value".
|
| I agree with your interpretation, but here the issue is that
| "beholder words" don't give the reader the information
| necessary for them to make their own judgment. Readers are
| left thinking "ok, but how low is 'surprisingly low?'"
| Writers should tell the reader the exact number, saying
| "surprisingly" communicates nothing because it's relative.
| kazinator wrote:
| The word _monotonically_ in _monotonically increasing_ is in
| fact redundant. It says nothing more than _increasing_.
| Mathematicians could cut out this word by adopting _increasing
| function_ in the place of _monotonically increasing function_
| without any loss of clarity.
|
| If the function goes horizontal sometimes, then it is
| _nondecreasing_. If always, then it 's _constant_ (at least if
| continuous).
| earleybird wrote:
| If I were to describe the function f(x) = 0 - x, it would be
| "F is monotonically decreasing". It seems both words are
| needed.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| What I learned was that "increasing" can imply a continuous
| series of increments, whereas "monotonically" qualifies that
| to unambiguously restrict the term to a specific meaning, not
| the casual one.
|
| Much jargon works this narrowing way, to demarcate that the
| concept should not carry the everyday cluster of associations
| and meanings, but rather a domain-specific meaning.
| kergonath wrote:
| > The word monotonically in monotonically increasing is in
| fact redundant
|
| Not at all. A function can be increasing over a given
| interval without that increase being monotonous.
| kazinator wrote:
| That's nice; now check your guess in the Wikipedia and
| other sources.
| ongy wrote:
| The value in the stock market is an increasing function, but
| neither nondecreasing, nor constant. And most of all, not
| monotonically increasing.
|
| The monotonically is important because it says that at every
| zoom level the function is increasing, while it being
| increasing just says it about the function shape in general.
| kazinator wrote:
| https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Increasing_function
|
| Any function that decreases over any interval of its domain
| is not defined as an increasing function, rightly so.
|
| A function that gets large with increasing independent
| variable can be called an asymptotically increasing
| function under the right conditions.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Shell scripts to improve your writing_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13295530 - Jan 2017 (55
| comments)
|
| _Shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My advisor rewrote
| himself in bash."_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1529166
| - July 2010 (31 comments)
| emmelaich wrote:
| _diction_ and _style_ commands were present in early Unix, which
| did similar jobs.
|
| You can get them (or versions of them) from GNU. They're in
| homebrew.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/software/diction/
|
| From what I remember, they weren't great; this bunch of programs
| probably does just as well.
| dogboat wrote:
| See also https://vale.sh
| Gimpei wrote:
| In my field, writing quality was on the very lowest rung of
| importance, below even teaching evaluations. As much as I value
| clear, concise prose, I'd say a grad student would be better
| served working on public speaking especially when faced with
| hostile questioning, and, sadly, with brown-nosing. Yes I am
| bitter :p
| disconcision wrote:
| how can you tell? likely this is field-dependent but even if
| because reviewers dont tend to comment on writing quality it
| doesnt mean it doesnt play a factor in acceptance. if you annoy
| people, (sometimes even especially) in ways that dont feel
| substantive enough to merit mentioning in a review, it can make
| them more inclined to be critical about aspects they might
| otherwise gloss over.
|
| (i acknowledge this is unsatisfyingly unfalsifiable, and that
| it can also go the other way, in that selectively bad writing
| can be used to attempt to paper over holes)
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I think even more than public speaking is just seeking a
| therapist. People get in over their head but its by their own
| doing. The stakes are never as high as you have built them up
| in your head. People want you to pass.
| ergotux wrote:
| Two resources which helped me improving my writing, when I was
| writing my thesis were "How to Write Mathematics" by Paul R.
| Halmos and "Mathematical Writing" by Donald E. Knuth et al. I
| would always start with Halmos to get into the spirit of perusing
| clear and precise communication. The "Bad/Better/OK" suggestions
| especially reminded me of the discussions in the lecture notes
| from Knuth et al. And at a third step a linter such as the
| proposed one is probably helpful, if something slips through.
|
| I think these resources are essential for anyone who writes on
| any subject which at least involves definitions here and there.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| It's interesting that you gain insights from a math book
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| It all adds up.
| knighthack wrote:
| That doesn't seem like a very divisive statement.
| hansvm wrote:
| Amazing how fast these meta-comments multiply.
| designed wrote:
| I'll break the combo here; another punny comment would
| only subtract from this already perfect thread.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I don't see how that could be a factor.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Prime example of a non-sequitur
| ilayn wrote:
| Which is an integral part of the public discourse.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Me too!, me too! I also want to make a clever math joke
| here!. Here we go...
|
| ...
|
| Dam, I forgot how I hated maths. My head aches.
| fasthandle wrote:
| Please don't take away from the point.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I'm not going to lie, algebra wasn't my cup of tea for a
| long time. Whenever you have a naive set of people
| commenting on a thread, my theory is that there is a
| category of folks who always take it too far leading to
| people feeling left out. An excluded middle if you will.
| I say education is at the root of the problem, and blame
| the state machine for that.
|
| I can't help feeling it just makes me tensor.
| ubj wrote:
| The comments oscillating between math puns and complaints
| about said puns are an ominous sin.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| some of these are getting pretty derivative if you ask
| me.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| I didn't expect the downvote. However, I want to assure
| that I'm not being sarcastic or attacking. I'm just
| stating that an insight can be found anywhere, and I
| think that's wonderful.
| techas wrote:
| I second those recommendations and add one: The Craft of
| Scientific Writing by M. Alley.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Next: create a bash script to find out if the PhD advisor reads
| HN
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Wouldnt need a bash script, phd advisor probablu gave you the
| password to everything already. Use the code they gave you into
| their office. Log into that laptop on their desk and use the
| gui to parse the history and see for yourself. If they catch
| you they probably wouldn't even care.
| bsder wrote:
| My first reaction was "This person isn't in a hard science like
| physics or engineering. Maybe medicine?" Ayup--medicine.
|
| Style can be annoying but _lack of context_ is deadly.
|
| "To our surprise, false positives were low (3%)." is not much of
| an improvement. "To our surprise, false positives were low (3%)
| as we expected closer to 10%." _IS_ an improvement.
|
| However, that statement in a hard science is going to cause
| people to start asking some questions: Is 3% actually low? Why
| was the expectation so high to start? Did you screw up your error
| bars? Is it _really_ 3%? etc.
|
| "It is difficult to find untainted samples." _Because_ is
| missing. In addition, this comment is rarely germane. I, the
| reader, don 't really care. That's _your_ problem. Either find
| the samples to get to statistical power or get a different
| method. As the reader, I only care if you did something weird in
| order to sidestep the problem-- _that_ I want to know about.
|
| All of the recommended things still retain "weaseliness" while
| trying to sound like they don't.
|
| Finally, I would love to have his problem of merely cleaning up
| some weasel words when most students I know (even at the PhD
| level) still have trouble stringing together coherent arguments
| and understanding where the holes and weaknesses are.
| rsfern wrote:
| FYI, the author used to be a programming languages theory
| researcher before changing fields to biomedicine. So I think
| you're reading into the field a bit
|
| You last point definitely resonates though
| bsder wrote:
| CS doesn't really classify as a "hard science" either, to be
| fair.
|
| All my physics professors, for example, were _anal retentive_
| about error bars--you had to put your error estimates in the
| notebook _in ink_ before you took measurements. If something
| was "better than expected" you were about to have a painful
| journey figuring out why.
| liontwist wrote:
| > To market a paper, the author must make a compelling case for
| why her idea deserves access to that resource.
|
| In other words, journals are filled with papers that were sold
| the best, not the most important ideas. And as the author also
| says, superficial things like hard to detect typos are often a
| deciding factor because the reviewers can detect them.
|
| we should stop pretending there is objectivity and embrace
| journals that reflect taste and opinion of the editor.
|
| Or have standard places like arxiv for publishing everything.
| There is no scarce resource for uploading pdfs.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The editor is not the one making the call really. Its the
| reviewers. If they give it few marks or no marks then that's
| it, its published. If they dog that paper down then the editor
| has to sit up in their chair and actually decide whether or not
| the authors made sufficient change to address the reviewers
| complaints. But even then its still the reviewers who are
| demanding the standard, not the editors.
| liontwist wrote:
| I desire the power to be with the editor.
| greazy wrote:
| The editor is the one who decides if to goes to review. Lots
| of 'top tier' journals the editors will quickly reject the
| manuscript.
| aeonik wrote:
| While we're at, improve the citation system, so I the
| references become hyperlinks, and code artifacts can be
| accessed.
| quickgist wrote:
| I find myself disagreeing with many of the examples. E.g.
| according to the article:
|
| Bad: It is quite difficult to find untainted samples. Better: It
| is difficult to find untainted samples.
|
| Bad: We used various methods to isolate four samples. Better: We
| isolated four samples.
|
| Something being _quite_ difficult reads significantly differently
| than just being difficult. You haven 't made the sentence better,
| you've changed the meaning.
|
| And the fact that you used various methods instead of a single
| method is information missing from the second sentence.
| t8sr wrote:
| And this is why I now have to read 30 page design docs that
| could have been 3 pages and said the same thing.
|
| Please try to understand why people have such strong dislike of
| floral writing, especially in technical texts. If you read a
| lot of papers or designs, it makes your life miserable.
| perching_aix wrote:
| When it comes to technical writing the only thing I can
| really discuss is documentation, and the key thing I'm
| personally looking for there is structure.
|
| It could be about basically anything, just please, pretty
| please, for the love of god, make it structured. And I don't
| mean sections with catchy headings, I mean as structured and
| reference-like as possible.
|
| I want to minimize the amount of time I spend reading prose
| and searching around, as well as the chance of missing
| things. I want to hit CTRL+F and be put where I need to be
| stat and have that be enough. Structure alone can convey a
| lot of the idea behind how something works - please trust me
| to able to utilize it to make basic leaps in logic.
|
| A bad example for this is AWS documentation. It's a mish-mash
| of prose and structured reference. A good example is the AWS
| CLI documentation (although if they lead with example usages
| first, that'd be even better).
| maccard wrote:
| Writing good technical text is an art. There is a certain
| amount of fluff that helps, and it's almost unnoticeable when
| it's there. Without it, it's too terse. Quite often, my
| complaint of technical documentation is "it did exactly what
| the docs said it would do, except in a situation that I
| didn't expect it to do that".
| vharuck wrote:
| Yes, it's the usual advice of how artists/authors/scientists
| make something: 1) Make the thing, 2) Try removing each part,
| 3) If the work fails without that part, put it back.
|
| For example, adverbs are good when readers might have the
| wrong image without them. E.g., "Alice [quickly] walked."
| Most of the time, writing is better without words like "very"
| or "quite."
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Something being quite difficult reads significantly
| differently than just being difficult. You haven 't made the
| sentence better, you've changed the meaning._
|
| The problem there is that the meaning _quite_ carries can vary
| significantly depending on the reader or the context where the
| word is read (so it can read differently depending on how
| previous sentences have primed the reader, which means the same
| person might read it differently with that context than if they
| start at that sentence. Quite differently, in fact!
|
| This is because in spoken form the word changes a lot with tone
| of voice. Technically "quite difficult" means "slightly
| difficult" but in many places actually means "damn near
| impossible".
|
| I'd day that while removing the word isn't wrong, replacing it
| with a more specific comparison would be better.
| mindcrime wrote:
| And as I understand it, Brits are particularly fond of using
| "quite" in a sarcastic fashion, so "quite difficult" in
| England might mean "not difficult at all, you sodding idiot"
| or something along those lines.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Brit here, this isn't something I'm familiar with. "Quite"
| usually means "somewhat" as in "I found the test quite
| hard". In upper class speech it can mean "very" as in "that
| was quite the challenge" or "agreed" when said on its own
| as a response to a statement.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Interesting. Maybe it's a regional thing, or a
| generational thing. Or maybe I'm just flat out mis-
| remembering. Or maybe some of my British friends told me
| that, but they were just taking the piss. :-)
|
| It's something I've come across references to more than a
| few times over the years though.
|
| EDIT:
|
| OK, FWIW, I can't find any solid reference at a quick
| glance to the form I was thinking of, but Google's "AI
| Search" GenAI thing does reflect what I was getting at,
| so I don't think it's completely something I made up.
| Unless me and the Google AI both hallucinated the same
| thing.
|
| Here's what Google has to say: In
| British English, when someone says "quite" with a
| slightly sarcastic tone, it usually means they are
| implying something is "not at all" or "very much the
| opposite" of what they are describing, essentially
| downplaying a positive quality to express mild
| disapproval or skepticism. Example:
| "Oh, that new restaurant was quite good." (Meaning: it
| was actually pretty bad) "He's quite the
| brilliant mind." (Meaning: he's not very
| intelligent at all)
|
| I probably did overstate the degree of emphasis of this
| though.
| russfink wrote:
| Regardless, your point is valid. Adding a valueless word
| like "quite" does not improve clarity or meaning and can
| only have a negative impact. Not worth the risk.
| buran77 wrote:
| > when someone says "quite" with a slightly sarcastic
| tone
|
| The sarcastic tone is the secret sauce which makes the
| difference with a lot of words, including qualifiers like
| "quite". Try applying a sarcastic tone to "definitely" in
| _the Earth is "definitely" flat_ and you'll see how
| people react.
| Izkata wrote:
| Teacher: "There's plenty of languages where two negatives
| will negate each other and create a positive, but no
| languages where two positives will make a negative."
|
| Student, sarcastic tone: "Yeah, right."
|
| (I have no idea where I got this from, read it online
| ages ago)
| sourcepluck wrote:
| A member of the British upper crust can correct me if I'm
| off the mark, but the definition there is of a really
| existing usage, and then the example doesn't match it at
| all. Did you make the example up yourself, by any chance?
|
| There is, in ordinary people's language, "yeah, it was
| quite good", when talking about a movie or something,
| which could easily mean, it was moderately ok, not
| amazing in any way. It'll depend entirely on tone, you
| could say it in a chirpy tone and you'd mean that it was
| actually pretty good. This is the most common usage, and
| familiar to our brothers and sisters and non-binary-
| siblings across the pond, I suppose.
|
| And then there's your mathematics teacher saying, "Oh,
| this lemma really is quite trivial", meaning it's very,
| very trivial, or a "quite difficult proof", meaning
| you've to drag yourself across hot coals for hours before
| it hits you.
|
| Then there is also the meaning you describe above! E.g.,
| a bunch of aristocrats are having dinner, and the
| candelabra suddenly breaks loose, flies through the air,
| and smashes into a thousand pieces with a crash. Luckily,
| no one is hurt.
|
| Everyone looks around, shocked, there's a few shrieks of
| course, and then one of them says: "Oh, what a smashing
| evening!" and the other says, in a bored drawl, "Quite".
| It's like an additional layer of being removed from and
| above the mere idea that the original thing could have
| been worthy of a positive comment (in this case, the
| dinner).
| barry-cotter wrote:
| This is another thing that is captured in tone more than
| anything though the Brits do have a well deserved
| reputation for sarcasm. Difficult to convey in print what
| meaning you want the recipient to get.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It may have been Jimmy Carr who pointed out that:
|
| Americans think that Brits can be quite patronizing ("pae-
| tr@-naI-zING").
|
| Actually it's patronizing ("peI-tr@-naI-zING").
| dspillett wrote:
| _> And as I understand it, Brits are particularly fond of
| using "quite" in a sarcastic fashion,_
|
| Brit here. Many of us are fond of using _any_ word/phrase
| with sarcasm, irony, or both.
|
| _> so "quite difficult" in England might mean "not
| difficult at all, you sodding idiot"_
|
| Depending on tone and other context "quite" can mean
| anything from a little to a huge amount. It can also mean
| exactly, as in "Well, quite.".
|
| This is why you need to be careful in professional and
| academic contexts, or anywhere in writing for that matter,
| and use domain specific terminology as much as possible.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > Technically "quite difficult" means "slightly difficult"
|
| Really? You must come from a different literary tradition.
| _Quite_ means _exactly_.
|
| See the first definition in the Cambridge Dictionary at
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/quite
|
| completely:
|
| The two situations are quite different.
|
| The colours almost match but not quite.
|
| I enjoyed her new book though it's not quite as good as her
| last one.
|
| UK formal Are you quite sure you want to go?
|
| Quite honestly/frankly, the thought of it terrified me.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Great examples, but you should probably remove the
| "completely" header - as the following examples don't fall
| under it. I'll delete this comment in 15 minutes ( * _ * )
| ninalanyon wrote:
| I didn't add completely, that's a quote directly from the
| Cambridge Dictionary.
| Timwi wrote:
| Not only is "completely" the definition they're quoting
| from the dictionary, it is also exactly what is
| exemplified by the examples, so I'm not sure what you
| mean by "don't fall under it".
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Ooooh, now I get it- I completely misunderstood that!
| Indeed, I can substitute every quiet with completely and
| it's meaning never changes from how it would've been
| interpreted!
|
| (And I totally forgot to delete the comment too)
|
| I just didn't realize that and only considered how I'd
| interpret the meaning of completely on is own. And that
| meaning doesn't translate to every example, hence my
| previous confusion
| codethief wrote:
| Your examples are excellent but I agree with the GP that
| "quite" can _also_ be used in the sense of "somewhat but
| not entirely".
| fasthandle wrote:
| Quite difficult = Not impossible.
|
| So, completely difficult. But _completely difficult_
| doesn 't sound quite right, probably as less syllables
| are preferred over many unless there's a quite good
| reason to prefer the latter.
| notahacker wrote:
| You've omitted the definition on the lower part of the
| page:
|
| quite
|
| adverb, predeterminer
|
| "a little or a lot but not completely:"
|
| _I 'm quite tired but I can certainly walk a little
| further. There was quite a lot of traffic today but
| yesterday was even busier. It was quite a difficult job.
| He's quite attractive but not what I'd call gorgeous. It
| would be quite a nuisance to write to everyone._
|
| The same dictionary also includes a grammar article
| clarifying that quite [usually] means "a little,
| moderately, not very", when the adjective or adverb it
| modifies is _gradable_ (e.g "good" or indeed "difficult")
| and it being an intensifier in [generally rarer] situations
| where the adjective or adverb isn't (e.g "it is quite wrong
| to say that 'quite' invariably means 'exactly')
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-
| grammar/qui...
| lupire wrote:
| My takeaway from all this is that "quite" means
| _literally_ nothing and belongs on the banned words list.
| notahacker wrote:
| I agree. It's quite useless.
| amelius wrote:
| > the meaning quite carries can vary significantly
|
| Yes, it can be read as a signal that there is some
| variability in the amount of difficulty.
|
| Putting more uncertainty in the wording is not necessarily
| bad, and in a scientific context it can be actually good.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Yeah most of his examples looked terrible to me. It's actually
| part of why reading papers is so damn difficult even when the
| paper says something simple. They're obsessed with this stilted
| formal tone that no one actually likes and leaves out subtle
| but important context clues.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Strong disagree. If you want to make a point about using
| different methods, say what you did.
|
| "We isolated four samples using the following methods..."
| gmac wrote:
| Can confirm the value of checking for repeated words such as 'the
| the'. This is the final example I give my Econ PhD students in a
| session on RegExps:
| https://users.sussex.ac.uk/~gm268/iphd/regexps/regexps.pdf
| skalarproduktr wrote:
| This is a great summary how to use regexps, complete with some
| very nice examples. Thank you!
| ninalanyon wrote:
| Just so long as it doesn't blindly modify "that that".
| gmac wrote:
| Right. You can just search for /\b(\w+) \1\b/ and see what
| comes up. There are usually false positives of one kind or
| another.
| Timwi wrote:
| I once wrote a sentence with a double "in" in it -- it was
| something like "let's see what state this is in in two weeks'
| time" or similar -- and at least two people commented
| thinking that it was wrong and needed an "in" removed...
| ofalkaed wrote:
| As a humanities sort I appreciate this but the scripts sort of go
| against the general thrust of the text since the scripts can not
| understand context or semantics, it feels like they would push
| many towards blindly following prescription instead of what he is
| advocating for. I think elaboration would have served better than
| bad, better and good examples which do not explain the issues and
| assume the reader will intuitively understand. We get some
| elaboration but not enough.
|
| Gardner's Modern English Grammar should also be the primary
| recommendation for further reading, Gardner has a gift for
| explaining the nuances of these things. Style guides are guides
| for the style of a given publication or writing within a
| discipline, not guides on writing well or with style.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Yes, I think the tool should highlight usages to double check,
| not blindly apply changes and submit.
| burgerzavr wrote:
| This is complete bullshit, he didn't make those examples better,
| just more to his autistic taste
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I found this an interesting read:
| https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/readers-brain
|
| It gives a neuroscience perspective on what makes certain writing
| styles clearer.
| teekert wrote:
| This what Claude/Chat do when you ask them to make text more
| concise.
|
| Have to say, Chat does produce what I am looking for in one go
| more often. Claude always makes lists or makes things way to
| concise. Maybe I need other prompts.
| tgraf_80 wrote:
| Good intentions, indeed. Creating lots of steering committee
| slides, I know about the wish from the audience of a simpler
| language. But 'very close' is different from 'close'. It's not
| just salt and pepper but trying to articulate a complex and
| nuanced reality. And yes, research papers then sound a bit less
| solid and complete- sorry, but often this is the reality you
| should not hide.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > But 'very close' is different from 'close'.
|
| What's the difference?
| simonw wrote:
| I got Claude to port those Bash scripts to a web UI so I could
| paste code directly into it and see what came out:
| https://tools.simonwillison.net/writing-style
|
| Claude transcript here:
| https://gist.github.com/simonw/e9902ed1cbda30f90db8d0d22caa0...
| bmacho wrote:
| I don't think it is working properly. The second(?) pattern
| match is bad. For example, for It is quite
| difficult to find untainted samples. We used various methods to
| isolate four samples.
|
| it gives Found "quite" in: "is quite
| difficult to find untainted samples." Found "various"
| in: ""
|
| Otherwise great work, I like these very fast html/js tools.
| KTibow wrote:
| Looking at the code, the issue is that both `findWeaselWords`
| and `getContext` construct a list of words but do it
| differently: const words =
| text.toLowerCase().split(/\b/)
|
| vs const words = text.split(/\s+/)
| simonw wrote:
| I pasted these two comments into Claude and had it update
| the tool: https://gist.github.com/simonw/dc79f6adcdb1894698
| 90bc0a44331...
|
| New version is now live at
| https://tools.simonwillison.net/writing-style
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Why not just use Claude itself to review the writing, instead
| of having it write a much less capable and brittle and limited
| bash script to do it? You could even ask Claude to write a
| prompt for itself that performs the same or better function
| than the bash script. Bash and Perl are like duct tape and
| chewing gum, so terrible for that kind of stuff, and it's just
| what Claude does best. It can go so much further by actually
| weighing alternatives and suggesting changes, instead of just
| flagging problems. And no weird regular expression
| inconsistencies that cause false positives and negatives and
| parsing errors.
| simonw wrote:
| My goal here wasn't to build the best possible writing
| analysis tool, it was to try out these 2010 bash script rules
| in a slightly more convenient format (and to play more with
| Claude Artifacts).
|
| I've actually had a tiny bit of trouble using LLMs for
| writing analysis in the past, though that was more about
| spell checking. I found they often missed obvious errors,
| probably because the tokenization step means they don't "see"
| the exact original prose in a way that makes those errors as
| obvious as they are to me.
| nazka wrote:
| If anybody likes this article and wants to know more about the
| process of writing effective PhD papers they should watch [1]. In
| fact, anybody who desires to improve their communication skills
| should watch it. It is so good that I would have paid to have
| access to this video!
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM
| 3abiton wrote:
| I wish there was a repo of "all the things you need to know
| when starting a PhD", include the famous phd grind.
| belter wrote:
| For the 10,000 of today: http://linyun.info/phd-grinding.pdf
| lupire wrote:
| The script appears to be missing a check for "long series of
| single-sentencr paragraphs", which quite harms readability.
| 65 wrote:
| I'd even go so far as to say that the removal of all adverbs from
| any technical writing would be a net positive for my newest
| graduate students.
|
| I've heard this before. Stephen King hates adverbs. However, it
| can be very difficult to remove all adverbs from your writing.
| "randomly" for example is an adverb, and if your sentence uses
| it, it can be difficult to rewrite the sentence without
| "randomly" that isn't long and complicated. Many adverbs are
| emphasis words that don't need to be in the sentence ("extremely"
| for example), but other adverbs are critical to the sentence.
| saghm wrote:
| I only heard the recommendation to completely avoid adverbs for
| the first time the other day, although in the context of
| creative writing rather than technical. I think there's
| validity to trying to define a uniform style without fluff for
| technical writing, but I can't help but think that trying to
| studiously follow personal stylistic decisions of famous try to
| improve as a writer won't usually end up with something
| particularly original. Does anyone think that Stephen King got
| where he is today by just blindly following idiosyncrasies from
| writers who came before him rather than developing his own
| style?
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