Link Roundup: June 17, 2024

An image a of a computer screen reading Documentation.

June 17, 2024

link roundup artificial intelligence

Here’s some more interesting content I found this week. As with my last link roundup, I generate summaries using AI tools (here I employ both Chat-GPT and Claude) and edit those summaries for accuracy and usefulness. Then, I offer some thoughts of my own.

Vicky Zhao, “3 Simple Ways to Make Clear & Concise Points | Stop Rambling!” AND Ian Daniel Stewart, “Engage your audience by getting to the point, using story structure, and forcing specificity”

Link to Video

Link to Article

Summary (Chat-GPT)

Note: This is a generated summary of Vicky Zhao’s video, not Ian Daniel Stewart’s article about it.

This video provides strategies for effective communication. It emphasizes the importance of storytelling for organizing information and avoiding rambling. The three main tips discussed are:

  1. Ensuring a central point: Think about your “one thing” when communicating, and branch out from there.
  2. A “3 Line Scene” Structure: Start with “one thing,” go deeper and/or add a surprise, and end with “what’s next.”
  3. Specificity: Embrace via negativa by considering what your point isn’t, rather than all of the things it is. This can help with specificity. “The success came not from ... but from ...”

These tips help in delivering messages more efficiently and avoiding unnecessary rambling.

My Thoughts

I came across Ian Daniel Stewart’s article online, which led me to Vicky Zhao’s video. As someone with a lot of thoughts and not always the best organization, I appreciate how clear and straightforward Zhao’s tips are. While the process of earning a doctorate gave me many of these skills, Zhao’s suggestions and the additional context and information from Stewart are helpful. I can see these resources as being especially useful for college students and may share Zhao’s video the next time I teach professional writing.

Daniel Allington, “The LaTeX fetish (Or: Don’t write in LaTeX! It’s just for typesetting)”

Link to Article

Summary (Claude)

Allington discusses the merits and drawbacks of using LaTeX, a document markup language and typesetting system popular among scientists and academics. The main arguments made are:

  1. LaTeX is often promoted as a tool that allows writers to focus on content without worrying about formatting/design. However, the author argues this claim is misleading - writing in LaTeX's markup is distracting and disrupts the flow of writing prose.
  2. Modern word processors allow structured writing and easy formatting changes without dealing with markup. The advantages claimed for LaTeX over word processors are either false or based on straw man comparisons.
  3. LaTeX is useful for its high-quality typesetting capabilities, especially for technical documents with math equations. But it is not well-suited as a writing tool for prose.
  4. For those wanting the typesetting benefits of LaTeX, the better approach is to write in a word processor or plain text editor, then convert to LaTeX for typesetting using conversion tools.
  5. Installing and configuring the LaTeX system is notoriously difficult and user-unfriendly compared to word processors.

In summary, the essay debunks common claims that LaTeX is better for writing and argues it should be used solely as a typesetting tool, not a writing environment for prose.

My Thoughts

This is one of my favorite articles I’ve stumbled across in quite a while. Truthfully, the generated summary included above does a disservice to Allington’s piece, which details many topics of interest to a documentation nerd like me, including:

If you’re interested in the technical side of writing and documentation, the history of writing media, or academic writing, there is so much to chew on in this article. It gave me a lot of ideas about my own writing workflows, and I don’t even use LaTeX. I highly recommend the article.

References