AI is fickle and fallible. Here’s why that’s confounding your expectations.

AI is fickle and fallible. Here’s why that’s confounding your expectations.

People have so much trouble with the flaws in AI tools because they are so different from everything else we do with our computing devices. Consider any productivity application you use: a spreadsheet, a programming language, an app, anything, doesn’t matter. All of these applications have two qualities: AI chatbots violate both of those rules….

Motivational editing checklist

Motivational editing checklist

A typical editing checklist includes things that editors should identify, like failures of parallelism, mixed metaphors, sentence fragments, and factual errors. But this is your motivational editing checklist. Follow this to make sure that the person you’re editing will understand, appreciate, accept, and address the problems you point out. Why bother? It’s a lot easier…

The thread
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The thread

I never write anything without the thread in mind. What is the thread? It is the throughline of any blog post, essay, or book chapter. Start with the end in mind. What is the point? Write the title and the lede based on that. Then, the setup. What is the problem? What is have I…

Networking for novices

Networking for novices

I’m helping a new college graduate right now to make connections that may lead to a job. She’s far more used to excelling at school assignments than making connections, so she asked me a basic question: what is networking and how does it work? For those of us who’ve been in business for a while,…

The power of clear writing: a student truancy case study
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The power of clear writing: a student truancy case study

Can clear communication get truant students to come back to class? According to the results of a recent experiment, a clearly written letter was 40% more effective than the school district’s usual gobbledegook communication. The truancy experiment To succeed, students generally need to attend classes. Legally, a school district must inform parents of truant students…

Another Gasper gaffe: an avalanche of alliteration
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Another Gasper gaffe: an avalanche of alliteration

It’s not just the things you should avoid in writing that are a problem. It’s the constant overload of those things. Too much passive voice, too much jargon, too many puns, too many exclamation points. If the reader is saying “Enough!”, the writer has made a mistake. I’ve written in this space before about the…