Without proper context, it can be difficult to understand someone’s intentions. Now, I take great pleasure in being responsible for my own writing projects — without input from others. That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate feedback, though. As a matter of fact, both during my education and professional life I got to experience what I can only describe as an excessive amount of feedback. Every word I had put down on paper was scrutinized; every original text was reshaped based on comments and insights from teachers, work colleagues — as well as everyone else perhaps unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon one of my pieces. The conclusion? I’m extremely aware of my linguistic choices.
That being said, except for the occasional oversight in the spelling department, I do enjoy circumventing the rules of the writing game. At times, I even craft my sentences like a jam band or free jazz musicians: it has to be fun and somewhat challenging to write. The reading is a bit of an afterthought. Here’s an example:
What’s about to follow is not another one of those the-entire-world-is-about-to-change kinda pieces, but simply one that tries to take a look at why my own life has been significantly changed over the past year — in rather surprising ways I couldn’t have imagined just by passively absorbing information that is thrown at me.
That’s a sentence from one of my works, Coexisting with Artificial Intelligence. Probably not the worst offender from a piece chock-full of convoluted sentences and other shenanigans, but it will do. Now, the obvious advice I’d give to someone who opts for such a peculiar style is: Try to keep it shorter. Also, you might want to reconsider all those hyphens. Our readers appreciate sentences that are to the point. Structure shouldn’t get in the way of comprehension.
Really, it shouldn't.
Of course, that’s far from the only criticism I could come up with, but let’s ask Llama 3 70b-Instruct-Q4_K_M to chime in. Here’s what it has to say:
Some potential areas for improvement:
Clarity: While the sentence is generally clear, the phrase “in rather surprising ways I couldn’t have imagined” could be tightened up. It’s not entirely obvious what these “surprising ways” are or how they relate to the author’s life. Adding a few words to clarify this phrase could make the sentence more engaging.
Pacing: The sentence is a bit long, which can make it hard to follow. Breaking it into two sentences might improve the pacing and create a clearer contrast between what the piece is not and what it actually is.
One minor suggestion:
- Consider replacing “what’s about to follow” with something more concise, like “this piece” or “the following”. The phrase “what’s about to follow” feels a bit formal for the overall tone.
Of note: I only provided that single sentence for a critical look. In other words, Llama had no additional context to work with. Still, I fully agree with those observations. So why not optimize for linguistic and structural efficiency? For clarity? In short: with my own place on the web, I have the freedom to ignore conventional wisdom and to experiment.
You see, it’s not always about pleasing an audience; to get a good grade from your teacher; to impress your peers; to craft a persuasive masterpiece to get the votes or sell an idea or a product. Sometimes, it’s just about the fun that stems from the craft itself. So why not benefit from the freedom to challenge anyone who’s adventurous enough to give it a try? Someone who consciously decided to spend some time with our work. Worst case: we just have to learn how to appreciate the sound of crickets.