Chit Chat Across the Pond
Adam Engst shares insights from his 35-year writing journey, highlighting the importance of editors, the superiority of Grammarly, and the blend of art and skill in writing, as well as the role of personal experience and inspiration.
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Long Summary
In this episode of Chitchat Across the Pond, I welcome back Adam Engst, the insightful mind behind TidBITS. Our conversation delves into the nuances of writing, the intricacies of editing, and the various tools that facilitate this process. Adam shares his extensive journey into writing, highlighting that the foundation of his skill stems primarily from relentless practice over nearly 35 years. He reflects on how his experiences have shaped his writing style, which deviates from traditional norms by embracing a personal and first-person narrative approach, a choice that was once frowned upon in tech writing.
As we navigate the complexities of effective writing, Adam contrasts his development as a writer with his lack of formal training in journalism, instead gleaning knowledge from observing others and enduring the editing process. This leads to a thought-provoking discussion around the role of editors and their vital function in enhancing an author's voice while ensuring clarity and conciseness. He gives a vivid example, discussing how even the beloved Harry Potter series may have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand to manage its escalating length and complexity over time.
We shift focus to the modern landscape of writing tools, where Adam reveals his reliance on Grammarly, a subscription he finds invaluable for catching common mistakes and enhancing his writing. He shares his initial skepticism regarding AI-driven editing features but admits that the tool has evolved significantly, offering suggestions that often improve his prose. The dialogue covers how these advanced tools can sometimes unintentionally introduce new errors while significantly reducing the frequency of trivial ones, such as misspellings and awkward phrasing.
Our discussion also critically evaluates Apple’s writing assistance tools, where Adam shares his dissatisfaction with their current functionality, describing it as inferior to what Grammarly provides. He explains how Apple's interface can obstruct a writer's workflow, with suggestions that lack clear indications of previous text—a frustrating experience compared to Grammarly’s user-friendly design.
Throughout the episode, we explore writing as both an art and a skill, emphasizing the importance of finding one's unique voice amidst advice to streamline and simplify language. Adam touches on the inevitable ebb and flow of inspiration in writing, likening it to the unpredictability of a runner's pace on any given day. As we wrap up, the conversation highlights the blend of technology, personal experience, and diligence required to produce high-quality writing today, making for an engaging and enlightening hour.
As we navigate the complexities of effective writing, Adam contrasts his development as a writer with his lack of formal training in journalism, instead gleaning knowledge from observing others and enduring the editing process. This leads to a thought-provoking discussion around the role of editors and their vital function in enhancing an author's voice while ensuring clarity and conciseness. He gives a vivid example, discussing how even the beloved Harry Potter series may have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand to manage its escalating length and complexity over time.
We shift focus to the modern landscape of writing tools, where Adam reveals his reliance on Grammarly, a subscription he finds invaluable for catching common mistakes and enhancing his writing. He shares his initial skepticism regarding AI-driven editing features but admits that the tool has evolved significantly, offering suggestions that often improve his prose. The dialogue covers how these advanced tools can sometimes unintentionally introduce new errors while significantly reducing the frequency of trivial ones, such as misspellings and awkward phrasing.
Our discussion also critically evaluates Apple’s writing assistance tools, where Adam shares his dissatisfaction with their current functionality, describing it as inferior to what Grammarly provides. He explains how Apple's interface can obstruct a writer's workflow, with suggestions that lack clear indications of previous text—a frustrating experience compared to Grammarly’s user-friendly design.
Throughout the episode, we explore writing as both an art and a skill, emphasizing the importance of finding one's unique voice amidst advice to streamline and simplify language. Adam touches on the inevitable ebb and flow of inspiration in writing, likening it to the unpredictability of a runner's pace on any given day. As we wrap up, the conversation highlights the blend of technology, personal experience, and diligence required to produce high-quality writing today, making for an engaging and enlightening hour.
Brief Summary
In this episode of Chitchat Across the Pond, I speak with Adam Engst, founder of TidBITS, about his writing journey over 35 years. We discuss his personal narrative style, the crucial role of editors in enhancing clarity, and how tools like Grammarly have transformed his process. Adam shares his dissatisfaction with Apple’s writing assistance, emphasizing its inferiority to Grammarly. We explore the balance of art and skill in writing, reflecting on inspiration's unpredictability and the importance of blending technology with personal experience for high-quality writing.
Tags
Chitchat Across the Pond
Adam Engst
TidBITS
writing journey
personal narrative
editors
clarity
Grammarly
Apple
art and skill
technology
personal experience
Transcript
[0:00]Music
[0:10]
Intro and Welcome
[0:07]Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat Across the Palm. This is episode number 809 for February 11th, 2025, and I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. This week, we have the delightful Adam Anx of Tidbits back on the show. Welcome back to Talk to Us Again, Adam.
[0:22]Nice to be here. Good to see you again.
[0:25]Always delightful. Well, obviously, people read tidbits because of the quality of the content and the perspective not found elsewhere by you and other fine authors there. But another aspect to me is how well-written the articles are. I consider myself a pretty darn good writer, but you're like a cut above on that. And in a recent article, you pull back the curtain a little bit on one of the tools that you're using. And it didn't make me respect you less. It made me respect you more. Oh, okay. I know you were worried about that.
[0:56]Forget him now.
[0:58]
The Art of Writing
[0:58]He's a hack. But before we dig in on that, without these tools, what made you become such a qualified writer? How did you get good at it?
[1:09]I believe the answer is practice, practice, practice. So, I mean, I have been doing this for almost 35 years now. So, 10, 15,000 tidbits articles, an entire shelf of books, hundreds of thousands of email messages. Right, that's what I do. And there's no question that I'm a different writer than I was back in the day. But I think I was decent to start as well. What I don't have, unlike you, you mentioned another recent guest, Jason Snell. I mean, Jason obviously has an incredible amount of experience and professional experience as well, but he also has a J school degree that, you know, he went to journalism school.
[2:00]Oh, journalism school. Oh, okay.
[2:01]Yeah, yeah. And similarly, my wife, Tanya, has a communications degree from Cornell. So, you know, she learned, she was trained on some of this stuff, as was Jason. And I, on the other hand, have a double major in hypertextual fiction and classics. So, yeah. Yeah, so everything I've learned, I've sort of learned on my own or from watching other people or from seeing how editors edit me, things like that. And so I don't have kind of the formal training that certainly some people do. But, you know, realistically, the formal training is mostly to get you off the ground, that the only way to become a good writer is to write a lot. And I frankly think to be edited a lot.
[2:48]See, that's something I have the great joy of having never had anybody edit me. I cannot, for a while, Sandy Foster checks me for typos. And for a while, she started kind of trying to edit. And I was just saying, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the way I say it. And I wonder whether that makes me a worse writer. I feel like what it keeps is my authentic voice at all times. Don't you feel about losing that when you have an editor?
[3:15]A good editor knows how to keep the voice. And so my best example of, or not a best example necessarily, but one of the things that I noticed was reading the Harry Potter books. And if you look at the Harry Potter books on a shelf, the first one's this thick, the second one's a little thicker, the third one, and then they just get massive. Gee, you think J.K. Rowling didn't have an editor after that in any significant way, because one of the jobs of an editor is to say, this isn't necessary. It might be okay. There might be nothing wrong with it, but it isn't necessary. And so, you know, those books just got huger and huger because they were such massive bestsellers. Who's going to edit J.K. Rowling in a strong way? And, you know, and I have no inside information, so perhaps I'm completely wrong and there was a huge editor that was like, oh, you should have seen what we did.
[4:18]
The Role of Editors
[4:18]But nonetheless, a good editor was, is, you know, has a different perspective on text than the author. The author in, I would argue, most nonfiction is more concerned with conveying information.
[4:43]And so, clarity? Clarity, yeah, clarity in multiple ways, both in like wording and in explanation, and providing background when needed, explaining terms that may not be familiar, making sure everyone's on the same page in longer things, in books, providing navigation. In essence, where are you in the book? That kind of thing. Obviously, in fiction, and certain authors are just wonderful, of course. There's certain nonfiction authors where the sentences are just like, wow, that person's really good. You know, like, they know how to craft a sentence. Yeah, like, and I am a good writer in that regard. I am not a great writer. Yeah, that, you know, I have written very small amounts of fiction very, very long time ago. That hypertextual fiction major at Cornell, I did have to write some fiction, and I continued on that for a little while. I don't, never published anything outside of Cornell magazines. But it's one of those situations where that's a different skill because you're looking at each word and saying, does this word convey the emotion I want? Or does this reflect the character? Or does this scene advance the plot? Those kinds of things where it's less structural and more, I'm not using the term negatively, but decorative.
[6:11]Yeah, right, right, right. Did you paint a picture of the scene that made me feel it or smell it? Right.
[6:18]And so I don't do that in a big way. I do it in a small way. And I try to set scenes. I write with a very specific voice. I write very much in the first person. And keep in mind, when I started doing this 35 years ago, tech writing in the first person wasn't done. Oh, really? It was considered poor form. Everything should be in the passive voice. You know, you didn't insert yourself into things, you know, because it was factual, you know, so your opinion was sort of irrelevant. I mean, early on, you know, this is like early 90s, I actually took some criticism for that. But, you know, like I didn't have the formal training that told me it was wrong, so I didn't do it that way.
[7:04]Thank goodness.
[7:04]Yeah, and obviously now I feel like the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that I'm a little... I won't say stodgy exactly, but, you know, I try to write correctly. I don't use slang a lot. I'm not throwing in obscenities every third word, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, like I got nothing on, I mean, bloggers are now old, and I certainly got nothing on, you know, social media posts, you know, the hot tics. And so, you know, so be it. You know, there's just nothing around that. Well, let's call it thoughtful.
[7:41]Not stodgy. But thoughtful and fact-based and researched, and so you know that if Adam wrote something, he knows it to be true. Yes. I don't think – I'm fairly factual, but I'm also willing to just pull something out of nowhere that is like, it seems like this is probably the case. But I feel like it is fruitless to try to find places where you got something wrong.
[8:07]I mean, it does happen. Don't get me wrong. Sure. But yeah.
[8:10]But it's a lonely hobby.
[8:12]Right. I mean, yeah. And I try. I mean, part of it is that I try. You know, like this is, you know. Yeah, you care. Again, I come from the age when if something was in print, it had been edited probably not just by one person, but by possibly two or three. Okay. You know, I still remember the first article I wrote for Mac user, maybe. It was a short review of some connectics app I forget what, RamDubbler maybe? One of the connectics ones but it was short it was like 600 words and my editor gave it back to me and this was in word format so it had change tracking on it and before she gave it to me she said don't pay attention to the amount of read, basically everyone changed words because they couldn't find anything to disagree with. And so at the time, every article went past like two or three editors. And so everyone had to make it look like they'd done something. And so they went and tweaked a word here or there or something. So I get this 600-word right back, and it's like all red. I'm like, but you changed everything. And she's like, well, not really, though, because if you look at it, everything you said is still there. It's just that we changed a lot of the words to slightly different words that meant the same thing.
[9:36]I was an engineer and doing mechanical drawings in my earliest years, and we had to pass our drawings through check. And I worked with a guy who would purposely put in absurd mistakes so that the checker had something to change and wouldn't mess around with what was really important.
[9:53]Well, and, you know, back when we were doing Take Control, Joe Kissel was our star author. And Joe writes brilliantly. He's a very, very good writer. And I remember, you know, Tanya saying, you know, she'd get a chapter from him. And she's like, I'm so happy I found three things. You know, like, and, you know, part of that, you know, part of that, you know, it's voice. And she's trying to maintain his voice and everything like that. So she's not changing things unless it needs to be changed and whatnot. But she wanted to make his shirt look like she'd actually done her work, too. and like read the entire chapter and was passing it back. I'm like, yep, you got this wrong. And you know that, but so, but there'd be five mistakes in a chapter or something. And I think that was the extent of it. It was beautiful to edit, edit show. Other people on the other hand, you know, who shall remain nameless, you know, their facts were fabulous. Like they knew what they were talking about. Like you wouldn't believe, but oh man, every freaking sentence, you're like, okay, I gotta, I've got to wade in and rewrite this sentence. Like this sentence doesn't actually say. It doesn't say what it wants to say. It doesn't say what it means. And so that kind of thing. And so, yeah, so there were people who we edited very, very heavily. And most of them, the vast majority, and this is how you know a professional writer, in my opinion, were happy that we had done so.
[11:18]Because a good writer knows that that's what a professional writer is that's.
[11:24]The problem to me is like how dare you think that i didn't write it perfectly i i just i don't think i could do it
[11:31]As i said you know at some point you're professional writer you're like you know i mean and you can just i mean people can disagree but what we find is is that if an editor is doing a good job authors disagree with very little professional authors um okay people who were professional authors and were a little too wedded to their terminology or to their phrasing. You're like, oh, yeah.
[11:55]Okay.
[11:56]Well, honestly, they didn't last because we edited them hard. And what really happened, honestly, was very quickly we learned with Take Control that writing a book with someone was like getting married. And you really didn't want to do it because someone said, hey, I'd like to write a book with you. And so we started basically saying, hey, that's great. We're so happy you want to write a book. What we'd like to do is have you write some tidbits articles first, and we'll pay you for the tidbits articles and all that, but it gave us a chance to work with them and see how they wrote and see if we could work with them.
[12:31]So have a first date.
[12:33]
Modern Editing Tools
[12:34]Yeah, precisely. And that also, you wouldn't believe the number of people that also just made go away because they weren't actually capable of writing a book or even an article and turning it in on time. And so it was a great strategy to, because if you just said, oh, that sounds like a great book we'd loved. And these were people who'd often written stuff in the past. It was like, they had a track record. We weren't just some random person. But that didn't mean that they're still in a state of life where they can turn something in on time. And so if they went away and said, we're going to write a Tibbits article and never turned it in? Oh, well. You know, that was neat. We were not married. We were not joined at the hip for the next 10 years, the royalties. So, you know.
[13:14]So, nowadays, with Tidbits, do you have an editor or are you using tools to do this for you?
[13:21]So, I have three people I can turn to for editing. Glenn Fleischman, who is a great editor. Glenn, he's a really fabulous editor. And he's the person I use when I'm a little uncertain about what I'm saying. And I want, you know, or it's a topic where I think he knows more about it than I do. Oh, okay. in some background way. And Glenn will edit hard. And yeah, I mean, it's like, don't get me wrong. There's a little bit of ego. You're like, really? You changed all that? But nonetheless, you're like, yep, he's making it better. The goal of, we call it laddering up. So every edit pass should make the text better.
[14:06]And so a lot of times, because there's not usually one edit pass. There's usually multiple edit passes. Because, you know, the author writes something, the editor takes a pass on it, and that's usually a big pass. The author responds to all those things, some of which require new writing. And then the editor goes back and again, and the second pass, or sometimes even the third pass, are much lighter.
[14:31]So Glenn is who I turn to for, you know, really, really deep stuff a lot of the time. Jeff Carlson and Egan Schmitz, also, who are also Tidbits authors and have written for us for years and close colleagues. Um they also are are really good editors um although they're much more um they're much more looking for actual mistakes and um and adding only things which they are truly expert in so like whenever i write anything about photography jeff has to edit it because he's a he's a professional photographer he knows vastly more about it than i do but even still he's not a rewriter he's he's much more of a like you know this sentence is actually slightly incorrect because of this thing you don't know, so I'm going to rewrite the sentence, but the rest of the paragraph I'm not going to touch. I see, I see. And so, and at this point, I mean, there's certainly, there are simple mistakes that happen, but not that many. And part of it is the tools, which we'll talk about, have eliminated many of the stupid mistakes that you used to rely on an editor for, you know, the doubled words, or you decided to rewrite a sentence or half of a sentence, and then because of that, the subject and the verb don't match anymore.
[15:50]They used to match. It wasn't like you don't know the subjects and verbs are supposed to match. It's just that you changed the verb because you've done some other work on the sentence. So those kinds of mistakes are less common now. And so that's why I think fewer of them, and certainly like spelling mistakes, no one should be making spelling mistakes at this point. You know, that ship should have sailed.
[16:13]Puts them back in for you.
[16:15]Those are not spelling mistakes. Those are different mistakes. Yes, if autocorrect is a problem at times, I mean, Apple's autocorrect in particular, sometimes you're just like, what the, where did you come up with that?
[16:30]Well, I'm convinced that it's changing things after I write it that I didn't catch it doing at the time. I know the difference between ITS and IT apostrophe S. And yet I'll go back and my editor Sandy will say oh IT apostrophe S Allison is a contraction of the word it is and she tells me every time it's like I know I didn't do that I'm sure I didn't do it unless I'm losing my mind
[16:54]So I don't know quite are you doing any of this with dictation.
[17:01]No I've tried and I can never get into the rhythm of it so
[17:06]I play with dictation in the iPhone in one particular use case. I don't do Tibbetts articles that way because it doesn't work for me. But I have noticed that with dictation, it will sometimes go back and change words earlier in the sentence.
[17:20]Yes, yes, I've seen that.
[17:22]Which is good. In some sense, it should be, because once the sentence becomes more clear, you're like, oh, well, that word I guessed at before can't be right. It's got to be this other one. Right, right. But so, yeah, so text, so you're absolutely correct, actually, though. On the one hand, we have the tools that just fix all the stupid mistakes. Simultaneously, we have tools that cause new ones, and they make your text a little indeterminate, because there are times similarly where I've had things, again, same thing, I was like, I didn't write that. Where did that come from? The most embarrassing one that happened recently, this is just terrible, I have been playing with voice input more And I've been using I find the voice control On the Mac to be much better than Dictation And, And voice control is the accessibility feature.
[18:16]Okay.
[18:17]It's where you can have it open and close windows and do commands as well.
[18:21]All right. And it has a dictation capability?
[18:24]Yeah. Anytime when you're in a text field, it just takes what you say and types it. The problem with that is if it's turned on and the cursor ends up in a text field, it just catches whatever is said. And I actually had a Tibbetts article where some text got in. I'm like, what the? Oh, my goodness. You know, like it was just like literally dictating into the middle of this article because I happened to be editing it after the fact. And there was a text field open. Yeah, I was not pleased with that one. I was like, oh.
[18:53]Big mistake. Like it got published that way?
[18:55]Yeah, temporarily.
[18:56]Oh, man, I wish I'd been reading that day.
[19:00]Our lovely Japanese translators caught it. Oh. But luckily, it was sufficiently random text. And in a particular spot, they read it as a quote, and they didn't understand it as a quote. And I'm like, oh, that's really not right. It was in the Apple Financials article. And I knew that it was completely spurious text, but they didn't. So other people probably didn't notice either. But I got an email from them asking, because whenever they don't understand something, they ask me, which I love. because usually it means trying to explain some idiom or, you know, what I was trying to get at so they can better translate it in Japanese. But yeah, I saw that. It was actually like, it's 10 o'clock at night, and I'm like, must go fix. I can't go to sleep knowing this one's half out there.
[19:50]No, that's for sure. You know what? I think I might want to try. I've been messing around a lot with Mac Whisper for doing transcripts for the
[19:59]
Comparing Transcription Tools
[19:58]videos that we've been producing. And I noticed that it's got a dictation feature. And I bet that's pretty good because it's using Whisper AI. Might give that a shot.
[20:07]So have you compared Mac Whisper to Audio Hijack's Transcribe?
[20:12]Audio Hijack's Transcribe just spits out a giant blob of text. Yes, it does. And what I'm trying to create is two different things, an SRT file for the subtitles that actually go, or closed captions, whichever, I always confuse what it's called, into the video. So those are time-stamped, and they're little segments, and that's a particular skill. And I also want a transcript that has, by voice, who said what, put it in bold, make it a separate paragraph, and, you know, give me those names and spit it out and mark down. And that's not something you can do. I mean, I could do Audio Hijack, but I'd have to pipe it. It just isn't.
[20:50]Yeah, yeah.
[20:51]It isn't there yet.
[20:52]I am curious. I'm working on an article to where I'm comparing transcription accuracy because that's what, like, Notes does it, right? Notes on the iPhone and the Mac. And so that was a question. It was like, you know, what does it? And you're right. The main problem with Audio Hijack's version is that it's a big blob. Right. Where I've found that to be unproblematic is, for instance, recording Apple's financials call. I don't really care who's talking. I mean, it's just sort of irrelevant. Sure. I mean, I can find out easily enough by listening.
[21:27]But could you make me some paragraphs or something?
[21:29]Yeah. They're aware of it.
[21:32]I'm sure. I'm sure.
[21:35]But basically, being able to search in that blob of text to get exactly what was said is vastly helpful. Right. And so, for various reasons, I didn't trust one of them over the other, and so I recorded both times. I'm like, oh, this one seems better than that one. So, any event, I'm working on some stuff, but I need to try Mac Whisper, too.
[21:58]I've done it with... With notability where I'm taking my notes and it creates a transcript at the same time, or it's creating the transcript because it's also listening. So it's got the audio recording, it's got the transcript, and it makes a note of when I wrote my notes. So I wrote something, and then I can play it back and say, did Tim Cook actually say that? And I can hear it, and it goes right to that spot. And that's been, and then again, I can actually just search the transcript for when did he talk about the price on the iPhone 16 Pro and pop it right up and hear I
[22:30]Haven't tried Notability. There was an app called PairNote that did that a long time ago and it stopped being developed. But I thought it was brilliant because it was the same sort of thing where you could – and you could also take photos, I think, with it, and they would be time-stamped as well.
[22:44]
Improving Transcription Accuracy
[22:45]Oh, that's cool. But I don't – it turns out I'm not very good at taking notes.
[22:52]You probably listened.
[22:54]Well, no, the problem is I try to take too many notes. I write down what's said. Yes.
[22:59]Um right i'm convinced that's why i didn't do as well in school as i could have is i took notes because i would transcribe everything they said instead of paying attention and listening and understanding what they were trying to teach me i think if i'd never been able to take notes it would have been better yeah
[23:14]Yeah but any event i mean so a lot of the stuff you know in terms of getting text right um i have been relying on editors less um because the tools have gotten much, much better in the last even couple of months, honestly.
[23:32]
The Power of Grammarly
[23:33]Wow. Okay, so we've gone 23 minutes, and we haven't told them what you actually use.
[23:37]Not even going to start. So I was a little surprised to discover this, but since 2016, I have been subscribing to Grammarly.
[23:49]Like actually paying for it?
[23:51]Actually paying for it. Real money. Actually, it says it costs $144, but for some reason I pay $132. I'm not sure why. I can see my annual bills. But still, not trivial money. Then again, this is my profession, right? If I paid an editor, that would get me, at the rate I pay my editors, that would get me an hour and a half. So whatever, right? I pay my editors well because I want them to do a good job. And so, you know, so compared to paying a person, it's trivially cheap. Right, right. But so Grammarly, I started using it because... Um, I really didn't, I didn't want people wasting their time catching things like the, the, or, you know, there's two spaces after the, you know, but, you know, between these two words, um, you know, like that stuff.
[24:45]And it'll do that for free because I do that free part.
[24:48]Right. And I think at the time it did not, um, again, it's been so long. I, who remembers? Um, and I don't remember, you know, what, you know, it may have, it may, it may not have had a free version then. It may have been you only got 30 days. I forget. But basically, they got so that they were catching enough stuff, even in the stupid links, the typos, the spelling mistakes, the double spaces, double words, all that, where I'm like, I have to pay for this. This is necessary for me. It is too embarrassing for me to have those kind of mistakes showing up in tidbits. and just because an editor read it didn't mean those mistakes were necessarily caught either right you know there's no guarantee no no it's.
[25:33]Real hard to see
[25:34]Especially when it breaks across a line um just devilishly difficult um so so this is so that's the kind of thing where that's how i got started with grammarly and um and a couple years ago they started to get into ai and at first I thought they did it kind of lame, you know, in a really pretty unimpressive way where they were getting into the summarization and the rewriting just in little bits and pieces, but it wasn't easy to use. And I could never see what the point was, you know, kind of in the like, but I wrote it once. I don't need to rewrite it or I don't need to summarize it. A summarization is one of those tools which I very, very seldom have any use for.
[26:19]But some point late last year, here. Oh, and actually, I should say, the other thing that's been great about Grammarly is it works everywhere. So, I mean, whatever app you're in, it works. There's a Mac app, it works in Google Docs with an extension, you know, with a Chrome extension, things like that. And so it's a little bit like you'll still hear people bemoaning the loss of spell catcher, which was a wonderful little spelling app. I don't even know how many decades ago that I forgot exactly what happened. The author may have died. I forget the details. But it was one of those things where it was by far the best spelling, spell catching app that there was at the time. This was before Apple had any kind of spelling built in. And so Grammarly uses the sort of the underlying concept and made it very easy to see mistakes and fix them. And then it also had the step through things.
[27:24]I wanted to add one more thing. When you said it works everywhere, the best part of it is you can tell it not to work in specific places. It's like, I don't want it to work in Visual Studio code. That is not where I need my typos checked.
[27:35]Or it's really terrible in places like Numbers because it puts this little button over your text. It's always like always over something. And like, I'm in a spreadsheet. I'm not typing anything. I'm not writing numbers. Just go away. So yeah, it's very good about going away. And once it goes away, it doesn't pay attention in that app at all. Um so so yeah so so what they what they really they start initially had like the underlining thing and this step-by-step mode we know where it's you know like a dialogue that pops up and you see a mistake and you decide to accept or reject and move on to the next one um and over you know in more recent years they've added an autocorrect which again it's basically like apple's autocorrect except for it's really pretty good um and it actually you can revert its auto corrects um so if it does do a wrong thing it's sort of like it it underlines it very temporarily so you see that it's done a little thing and then if you hover over that word later it knows that it's still it was one that it corrected and we'll put it back i never do because i do make those mistakes but i.
[28:41]Do love that when you hover it's it's actually faster to hover click than it is to fix it yourself
[28:47]Yes yes and.
[28:49]So it's it's super fast to go uh yeah you got that right skip that one
[28:55]And so, you know, so like there's a lot of times when I have made a mistake just because like I'm not a perfect typist, you know, my finger stumbled and I misspelled a word or something. It's not that I don't know how to spell it, but it underlines that. And I'm like, yeah, fix it. Again, I'm not doing anything I don't know how to do. I'm just doing it faster. The other thing that they added quite recently is what I call tab to correct. And basically at the end, you get you're sort of at the end of a sentence and it's underlined a couple of things that you've made mistakes you've made. You can just hit the tab key and it fixes them, you know, like three or four of them all at once. It's really great. And, you know, again, in this case, you don't get to see what it's going to do. But if you know what you're writing, you know what it's going to fix. You know, like, yeah, you forgot an apostrophe there, you know, there you lost a, you know, you doubled the whatever you can see. And then it just fixes. And of course, you can go back and, you know, it will it will put it back if you want.
[29:51]It doesn't show you what it's going to correct, though.
[29:54]Not in the tab to correct. You have to take it on faith.
[29:57]I got to see it. I got to see every line.
[29:59]No, you don't. Because you know what the mistakes are, right? If you just, because it's underlined them, right? You know, they're red.
[30:06]Oh, they are underlined.
[30:07]Yeah, yeah. They're underlined in red. Oh, okay. You can see what's wrong.
[30:10]You just can't see what's wrong.
[30:11]I just missed, you know, I dropped a letter in this word, you know, satisfaction, you know, there's something wrong towards the end, you know, right? So it's just, right. It's just going to fix, it's just going to fix the word and put it back the way it was.
[30:23]I thought you meant you couldn't even see what was wrong, and that was kind of scary.
[30:27]No, no. You can see what words are incorrect, and you can't see what it's going to change them to, but you know because they're just misspelled or stumbled. So I'm not sure I have hardly ever reverted the autocorrect or the tab correct. It's that good. It doesn't make stupid mistakes.
[30:49]In my writing, I often have HTML URLs, and it is constantly telling me something's misspelled in a URL, and it's like .com or something. You know, it's like, leave me alone. Stop that.
[31:03]Those are, I mean, any time you bring in Cody-like things, it's going to have trouble. Yeah. I mean, because it's not text. It's not words.
[31:15]Mostly I use Markdown, but with my figure, images and stuff, that's where it gets really annoying. But I can skip over those. But that's why I was worried about tab correct if
[31:26]
Apple’s Writing Tools
[31:24]I don't know what it's going to do. It could actually break the code.
[31:27]I don't think it would do that.
[31:29]Okay, so that's all the stuff you get for free.
[31:32]Is it? I literally don't know what's the difference between free and not free is because I paid for it for so long. so.
[31:40]It's the rewording of sentences and saying you know i could tighten this up or you've you know you've used really so it never wants you to use the word really
[31:49]Never which is which is an editor will flag that 99 of the time too um but the yeah so the the new feature that popped up late last year which it actually went away briefly um because like it's it's cloud software right so you know they can make they can add and remove stuff at will as and basically i got it i'm like oh this is amazing this is great i started using it and used it for i don't know three weeks or something like that it goes away i'm like i'm writing to support going where did you put my feature where i want the feature back and they're like you know and then we were saying oh you know we're so sorry like it wasn't working right we had to we had to pull it away um and so and i'm like no no you should put it back why don't you at least tell me when you put it back um i think i found i think i noticed it was back before they told me i mean it was that but so yeah so this feature basically um this works in almost all places um certain text um environments and web browsers somehow seem to stop it but basically you select some text um paragraph at a time is usually easiest um and a button sort of a weird looking button with a little menu and a little drop down triangle appears on the left side of in your margin you don't even have to click it you just hover over it. And Grammarly puts up a little dialogue above or below your selected text. So right above or below. So you're not distracted by anything else. And it gives you a better version.
[33:18]What it thinks is a better version, or at least an alternate version. It actually has two modes. You'll see the button on the left turns as red. If they're like, we think there's a real problem here. You should fix this. Or blue of, well, we'll give you some alternates. You know, blue means It's probably no actual mistakes, but we think we could do better.
[33:38]And in that little window that appears, it shows you –, clearly highlighted what it's going to change so you know deletions are shown um addition deletions are shown in gray with the strikethrough additions are green and and you can click on each one of those you don't want to accept because there might be there might be five or ten in a long paragraph right you know it's not it's not going to be this isn't this is actually like making suggestions so you can go hey no that's wrong i like mine better oh that's pretty good That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Pretty good. And then at the end, you click accept, and it replaces your paragraph with what you've let it do.
[34:20]And so what I found is that, again, I do the same sort of writing day in and day out. A lot of my sentence structure and terminology, just really hard to vary it up. I mean, how many times have I written about a new version of macOS? Yes you know like it happens it happens like 15 times 20 times a year um so like there's only so many ways you can say things and so and and also like i'm working quickly and you know like apple apple released you know new versions of all the operating systems yesterday afternoon i had to write those up for tidbits you know in relatively short time um you know figure out what there was to say and do the writing and all of that you know like there wasn't time for me to obsess over my wording. You know, I had to get the information out and had to get it done by this time.
[35:10]And this lets it obsess over your writing. It's got a vast array of alternate ways to say things.
[35:16]Pretty much. And what's fascinating about it is that you can go down the rabbit hole. So each time you click that button, say you click it and it makes five suggestions, you take them all. They're all fine suggestions. You're like, okay, that makes my paragraph better. Then you select the paragraph again and click and you know hover the over the button again it will make more it will sometimes even change its mind and reverse the other ones, because keep in mind it's an llm so all it's doing is saying you know what are possible you know other other words that could fall in this place other ways of saying this and there's always multiple ones and you might have come up with one and it came up with another there might be a third it might go back to the first one you know so you you you have to really learn to not keep going down the rabbit hole or you could spend all day like looking at this going well do i want this word or that word yeah do it again what are you gonna be this time um so so that's the that that's like the hardest part of the whole thing so but what i really like about it is i i will often, I don't usually do this until I'm done with an article, um, is I will go through paragraph by paragraph and go and look at its suggestions. And some I take, some I don't. Um, but you know, Sometimes it makes the text better, sometimes not.
[36:46]It's not as good as a really professional editor, but it's a tool, right?
[36:52]But it also doesn't argue with you.
[36:54]It doesn't argue with me, and I can just say, no, no, no, no. Ooh, yeah, good one. And it doesn't take offense because I said, no, no, no, no, no.
[37:04]It's interesting that it makes better sentences for you in some cases because my understanding of the way large language models llms work is that it's a predictive model of the most highly probable next thing that would be written that it'd be at a letter or a word and so you would think that it would dumb it down to the highest probability way people say this particular thing And you would think that would make it boring.
[37:28]So I think what people are not realizing, and I've only been kind of coming to this myself, to understand this myself, is that that's the theory. The reality is that you only get something out of an LLM with a prompt and with context, right? Oh, right, right. So we don't actually know what the prompts are. Grammarly doesn't expose the prompts. They just say, like, our best version. But they do have, like, you can click the rephrase button and you can get, you know, formal, friendly, shortened, right? And so those are different prompts that give you different results.
[38:14]But you know what else? Your text is part of that prompt.
[38:18]Your text is the context, right, precisely. Right.
[38:21]Yours is going to be different than mine. I could be describing the same thing, and I would get a completely different version of it because of the prompt.
[38:28]I mean, this is a huge thing to realize about LLM. So, you know, all these people like, oh, it's a glorified autocorrect. Well, it is, but it's really glorified. And this has changed vastly over time.
[38:43]So the context in which an LLM operates is the prompt and your source text and all of that, like all that stuff put together, right? And it works on number of tokens. Token's sort of roughly equivalent to a word. Not quite. I don't quite understand that yet. But to give you an idea, I have to ask my son who actually studies this stuff. But the Gemini 2.0, which just released, and I actually find Gemini to be by far the worst of the chatbots. It's just terrible, as Google has implemented it and everything, all their tools. But I just saw the stat the Gemini has a 2 million token context, so in other words it can take whole books as context, for doing answering a prompt so the more context you feed an LLM the more that's going to adjust what the output of that glorified autocorrect is, And so, again, with Grammarly, one of the other options in that is to, you know, like, enter your own. And basically, that lets you enter your own prompt of what you want to have it do with that paragraph. I never use this. This is not actually useful to me as a writer. But that's where you can say, turn this into a limerick.
[40:09]And because that's, you know, you're talking directly to the LLM at that point. And you don't so much do.
[40:14]Limericks in tidbits, usually.
[40:16]Not a ton. Long ago, I did think about doing poems about news events, because they weren't really interesting to write up, but I thought it might be interesting to do them as free verse. Never went anywhere.
[40:35]When people go to read your article, by the way, he does include a limerick for us about that, so that's a lot of fun.
[40:42]So so yeah so so but this but so in other words we don't know quite what grammar these prompts are um but if you didn't like it you could always put in your own um so what i find is they're pretty good and um you know in terms of like i want i basically want my text but i want it spiced up a little bit you know i want to i want it a little i want to i want to make sure like the sentences flow a little better sometimes sometimes i'll have written a sentence i'm like oh man that's just a little horsey um yeah i know you like that um visually horsey is different um but uh but so the you know so so there's times when i'm like yes i could spend five minutes trying to think about how to readjust this or i could just click you know hover over this button and and grammarly will give me a rewrite on the sentence you, And I'm like, oh yeah, that's a better way to adjust the clauses. You know, it just moves the clauses around or something like that.
[41:43]That's especially useful for when, there's days when you're writing and it's just singing. I mean, you're just getting it. Just your sentences, you know, they may look like garbage the next day when you look at them, but it feels like it's really good. But then there's other days where you're trying to write a sentence and you cannot figure out how to write it where it's not passive voice and just so boring you want to shoot yourself, much less the poor person who has to read what you're writing.
[42:06]Right. I mean, writing is one of those skills that it doesn't, I mean, like, yes, it comes, quote unquote, naturally after a while, but that doesn't mean it says it's always the same level of easy, you know, and, you know.
[42:18]And it's kind of like running, right? You feel like you could run a thousand miles and other days you're like, you can't get to the end of the block. It just doesn't.
[42:26]Exactly like that. And the other thing that I run into is that I've realized I actually am like an LLM. I don't usually know what I'm going to write until I've gotten there. So I don't do outlines. I have an idea for an article. I write the title. I reserve the opportunity to go back and change the title completely. And then I start the article. And I write through to the end. And I don't move things around. I don't go back and rip chunks out and that kind of thing. Hardly ever. I mean, I am a linear writer. And then basically, one of my quote unquote problems is I'll start writing something which I thought was going to be short. And it stops being short because like, well, I need to say this now. But if I do that, then I need to explain where that comes from. And ooh, I wonder what the stats around that are. And before I know it, I've written a thousand word article You know, when it was supposed to be a, you know, one paragraph Pointer at someone else's cool, cool thing.
[43:34]I think that's one of the reasons we get along. I am the exact same way. Well, that's what my articles do tend to go on and on and on. And I keep thinking I should do an outline because I feel like my articles would be better if I structured them and said, these are the points I want to get across. Here's each of the headings of what I want to say. But I try to do that and it never works. I just start barfing words onto the page and eventually I figure out, oh, that's the story I'm telling. I didn't know that's where that was going to go.
[44:02]I can do it for books. I I mean, when I've written books, I'm pretty good at outlines because you have to be. I mean, like, it's just too much, you know, and you've got to know where you are and what you're doing and all that. But, I mean, this is, as it turns out, I have distinct memories of high school, grade school, I'm not sure exactly where, of, like, not understanding paragraphs. You know, it's just like, hmm. I mean, actually, no, I take it back. Paragraphs is even later than that where I'm just like, eh, it's looking a little long. I'm going to hit Return of the Metal. You know, like that's how I tend to think in this kind of stream of consciousness and can put it out. And it makes sense, but that doesn't mean it's well visually designed. And these paragraphs exist for a reason. And ancient Greek did not have spaces or paragraphs, by the way, just so you know. And that's why I like them now. And I do remember, like, again, in high school, you know, like when we were forced to do outlines, I was like, but, but, but, but why? You know, like, and, and to this day, I will often write an article that has gotten longer than I thought it was going to be and gone back in and put in subheads.
[45:17]Put in what?
[45:18]Oh, subheads, basically an outline level.
[45:21]Oh, okay.
[45:22]Headings. Yeah, for me, H2s, right. You know, I've been, you know. Yeah, H2s. H2, H2, H2, H2.
[45:26]By the way, do those. Those are really important for the blind, for voiceover and other screen readers is they can jump from heading to heading without any headings, they've got nothing to navigate.
[45:36]Well, and see, the problem is that, Mostly, I write to be read linearly. This is ironic given the fact that I majored in hypertextual fiction. But when I'm writing an article, it's not long enough to provide navigation. You should not be jumping around in my articles. You will be confused. They are meant to be read from start to finish. And so it is relatively uncommon for me to think, oh, I should have a new section here. And, you know, put in a subhead and then it's the next section. So, the, you know, that's really, you know, again, that's one thing that, you know, I find an interesting just difference in the way different people write. So, you know, so...
[46:23]I tell you what, Adam, let's jump to your heading level two where you wrote in this article, what about Apple Intelligence's writing tool?
[46:31]Why don't you use Apple Intelligence? Yeah, that was definitely added after the fact. so yeah so so partly this this article came out i have been meaning i mean i've been subscribing to grime relief for you know eight years or something right i'm a little embarrassed that i've never written about it and did that so that was that was sort of the initial thing but then i'm like well you know how does apple intelligence stack up you know and and to be brutally honest and it doesn't stack up in the slightest because I'm still working on a 2020 iPad. So I can't use it on my main Macintosh.
[47:06]Okay.
[47:07]But my M1 MacBook Air, I can use it. So obviously I do know, I have used it, I do know how to use it.
[47:14]But it was interesting to me because Apple, you know, sort of makes a big deal about its writing tools. You know, it can do proofreading and rewriting and summarizing. Again, what's with all the summarizing? But the... If you use it in mail or notes, it's pretty good. Messages technically, but who writes enough in messages to do much? And that's it.
[47:43]Initially, Apple's like, oh, it will work everywhere. And I'm like, well, that's great. Good on you, Apple. And then I tried to use it. And the version of writing tools that works everywhere is completely worthless. It is so hard to use and so badly designed at an interface level that it is unusable. So the Mail and the Notes versions, pretty good. They actually did a decent job. You get this little controller. It's easy to bring up. It highlights the words it's going to change. You can see what it's going to change them to. All those kinds of things that Grammarly does pretty well. It's good. It's not great, but it's good. And whereas if you are just using the universal writing tools options, it's completely and utterly unusable. You know, that like it puts up a suggestion with no indication of what's changed in the entire paragraph that it's proofread supposedly. And it puts the dialogue over your text. You can't even like visually compare.
[48:46]So it's like tab to complete. I'm not going to show you what you had. I'm not going to tell you what I changed. Good luck.
[48:52]Good luck. All you can do is click replace.
[48:55]Replace or copy. Copy. So copy, which means you have to go paste it somewhere, then go word for word to figure out what had changed?
[49:04]
Evaluating Apple Intelligence
[49:04]So totally not going to do that. I mean, part of the reason why I have become so fond of Grammarly is that it's so fast to use that if i have to be doing any kind of like visually comparing like looking at these two paragraphs to see which one looks different from the other and how and then manually making the changes right what if i only want to take half the changes it made like right you know brain blows up there.
[49:34]Are people who are not good at writing at all yes and where this is like whatever you wrote yep bet that's better than what i wrote sure i do i do know people who use these tools that way it's like i just know i i stink at this i'm good at this other stuff i'm not good at this you go girl but that's not you and me
[49:54]Fair fair enough but you know the fact that apple put a real interface into notes and mail says to me that they know this they know this sucks um i my suspicion and i haven't talked to a developer about this my suspicion is is that the apps have to be rewritten to support that artificial intel you know the that apple intelligence interface that um you know that they apple simply can't do the same thing in any random app um without the app itself being aware of it.
[50:30]Okay. Okay. Well, so
[50:32]It's, which means.
[50:33]Over time it was done.
[50:35]Right. Oh, right. It's still in beta. La la la la la. Sorry.
[50:41]Well, compared to some of the other things, I don't know, it's maybe not as bad as some of it, right? I don't, yeah.
[50:49]I mean, I actually am not particularly perturbed about, you know, I find that the beta aspect of it is like, yeah, it doesn't work perfectly, whatever. Um you know it's not like any software necessarily works perfectly uh but uh but more that um uh if you're going to go and turn it on for tens of millions of devices maybe it's not you know by default um as they did in in the 0.3 updates maybe it shouldn't be in beta then yeah.
[51:16]Maybe maybe i mean
[51:17]And it is their primary marketing feature right you know like this is all apple talks about right.
[51:23]Yeah i'm not quite sure why they did that that doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm going to close this off here and I'm going to make a commitment that I will pay for Grammarly for one month and use it with anger. No, in anger. In anger, that's the way they say it, which means for reals. I'm going to use it and see if I can stand it and see if I think it makes my writing better. I will make that commitment on the air right here today. I even gave myself a
[51:53]Yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see, you know, how you like it or don't like it. And, you know, it may be one of those things, it's possible their default prompts are too far from what you feel your voice is. And so you may be like, oh, you're changing too much. And like, I'm not benefiting enough from it. Um clearly that's not the case for me um you know that i is that i'm just you know like yeah that looks good that looks good you know i mean it's not it's not that i'm not that i'm accepting everything don't get me wrong sure sure but uh but i there's times i'm like oh that's a much better word than the one i chose you know like i have a feeling.
[52:32]What it's going to be better at is being more concise i tend to if i write an article and then i don't publish it right away and I wait until the next day and I edit my work, I'm like, man, you took like three sentences to say what you could have said in five words. You know, that can be much better. So I know that I get too flowery and long and I could tighten these things up.
[52:51]It probably won't do that at the paragraph level. It works at the sentence level mostly. So you'll see it saying like, you know, such and such over the years, it'll take out over the years or suggest taking that out. And you're like, yeah, okay, I get it. You're like, you know, that doesn't necessarily- It probably wasn't instantaneously. Yeah, right. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. And, you know, and as I said in the article, it has certain words it just hates, like really and very and actually and both and own.
[53:19]Do you let it take those out?
[53:21]No. Most of the time, no. Because I'm a professional writer. When I use them, I mean them. Yeah.
[53:27]Yeah, that's what I'm saying. No, I want them to go, no, I mean, really. It's different.
[53:33]Yeah. And so... And again, very is a bad one. Like people, very needs to come out in 99, 98% of the time. But actually, you're often really setting up a dichotomy between this thing that is true and this thing that you thought would be true. And it's not just one on the other. No, actually, it's this other one. And so that's the kind of thing. Or both, where I'm really implying that these two things together are problematic. It's not just and so there's a lot of that sort of stuff or own you know like you know you set up your own domain name if you take out own you set up your domain name it does not have the same meaning right? No you know so like so you need that's the kind of thing where you know I, after we talked about this I actually reported these to Grammarly Support and they to be clear to be fair they got back to me and basically said you know we're passing this on to the dev team, we can't promise anything, but they'll take it into account. Because there are certain words where you can't say, stop suggesting this. But then again, I also treat it like a tick. Writers have ticks, editors have ticks. They make these mistakes all the time. Sure.
[54:52]Adam and I talked about one of my questions was why Grammarly always wants to hyphenate open source when I say open source software. And the Open Source Foundation actually wrote an article explaining, no, it doesn't have a hyphen, and it's called a lexicalized noun? Is that what it was?
[55:10]Yeah, it was something like that. I had not heard of it before.
[55:13]Not a compound noun, which would be... Was it lexicalized compound noun? Was it both words together?
[55:22]He's hunting for my email voice. It was a lexicalized compound noun, not a compound modifier.
[55:31]There you go. Okay, so compound modifier would be, well, actually, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but I sent that to Adam, and you were so happy because you now had a way to say, no, this is wrong, stop correcting it, and you sent that over to them too.
[55:46]And and that one they actually said um you know uh i have forwarded your text to our development team for investigation for reference your ticket is such and such we'll work on resolving but likely take some time to get to the bottom of it in essence this wasn't the oh thanks for your suggestion they're like oh that's an actual bug yeah.
[56:03]Having having having the the source of this phrase be owning it you are doing
[56:09]It wrong right you know that's like this is and and so like because I mean, things like, you know, complaining about my use of, you know, your own domain name, that's not wrong. It's preference, you know, and I can back up what I'm saying, but it's not actively wrong to take it out. Whereas hyphenating open source has been, is, you know, grammatically incorrect.
[56:32]In this case, open source reporting, I think that would be hyphenated.
[56:37]That would be a common offer.
[56:38]But open source code, because open source means something else.
[56:42]
Conclusion and Reflections
[56:42]Right, right.
[56:42]Well, we don't want to get too much into the details of that, but this is, well, we could go on for days, but this has been super fun. I love the combination of pedantry about correctness combined with getting to use geeky tools, Adam. This is a lot of fun.
[56:57]Nothing like pedantry, geeky, pedant, the automatic pedant. Yeah. I got to think about this. There's got to be like an auto pedant or something.
[57:08]Automated pedantry? Auto pedant. That's what we want. We don't want auto correct. we went auto-pedded.
[57:12]Well, actually.
[57:18]I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the Podfeet podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeet.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're going to find different ways to contribute. You can donate one time through the big donate button with a credit card or Apple Pay, or you can use PayPal. If you want to make a recurring contribution, click the Patreon button. Keep in mind, I don't charge Patreon for chitchat across the pond or program by stealth episodes just once a month for the Nocilicast. That keeps it simple. If you want to contact me for any reason, you can email me at alisonandpodfeed.com, and you can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed.com.
[58:07]Music