Revising again
One more addition to How to e-mail a professor, now that I can get through to ChatGPT: Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.
Revising
I took a look at How to e-mail a professor the other night and noticed three sentences that needed revision.
Writing it and changing it
John Kander: “The ideas can be terrible, and nobody is a bad person because they have it. So you write it, and then you change it.”
Editing in Zits
Say “Thanks, Mom.”
“Lane Greene on Editing”
An especially good episode of the BBC podcast Word of Mouth : “Lane Greene on Editing.”
A Mark Trail revision
Mark, are you reading cue cards? Or are you just a big hunk of clip art? Look at Cherry when you speak to her.
Too many ands?
When Paul Romer of the World Bank criticized the Bank staff’s writing and called for shorter, clearer documents, he pointed specifically to excessive use of and and insisted that the word account for not more than 2.6% of a Bank report.
“The Letter,” revised
“The Letter,” a poem by Charles William Eliot, revised by Woodrow Wilson, revised again by San Francisco schoolteacher Eliza D. Keith.
Speed v. accuracy
A fortune cookie, revised.
Draft, draft, draft, draft
John McPhee on revision.
How to improve writing (no. 12 in a series)
From 28 syllables to 16