Copy Editing / Readability Guide For Authors

[jakbird]

"In a world of digital noise and clutter driven by new generative artificial intelligence technologies, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has announced "slop" as the 2025 word of the year."  A recent news story

I've just ended a multi-year proofreading project for a friend's soon to be published academic book, initially translated from a foreign language by ChatGPT.  I agree AI is a useful start when translating, but what I've learned from the experience is it still takes quite a bit of work to produce a quality work.  For English as a second language authors, I recommend translating the entire story from one's own language to English, rather than the piecemeal approach of a section at a time.

For native speakers, I suppose AI helps, though I'd never use it.  As Teann points out, the lack of continuity, especially in longer stories, has no excuse.  It's laziness and a callous disregard for the reader's credibility.  I can't speak for anyone else's motivation, but for myself the reward comes from seeing the written word on the screen, from my hand, not a machine.  Granted, the audience for my stories is small compared to the others on Gromet, a handful a week.  Even so, if only one person enjoys my efforts it's worth the effort I put into crafting a unique story.  Cranking out slop with an AI might lead to immediate gratification from large view counts, but who deserves the dubious accolades, a computer?  Is losing one's reputation worth it?

Use AI to clean up grammar and syntax?  Sure, but change the content?  Never, that's the essence of creativity.  I cast my vote to keep out images, too.  There's a place for that; it's called a comic book.  Keep out the slop, Teann.

By the way, I have this idea for a long novel.  I've written the first sentence.  Can you fill in the next 120K words, edit as you see fit...
  Jack Peacock

[saramyers95]

Great guide, very helpful for new writers. Thanks for sharing!

[Observer]

In a very, very broad way, art has two steps

1:  get an idea, be creative

2:  Execute the idea (write it, paint it, sculpt it etc etc)

Writing is hard, or at least for me it is (and I suspect I am not the only one).  But it's the work that is necessary to create art!  Having an idea is not enough.  Every paragraph, every sentence has to be crafted.  You can't just tell create a prompt to have AI write it - imagine how ridiculously large a prompt would have to be to write a novel-lenght story!

The work is what transforms ideas into art.  If a computer wrote it for you, it's not art, and it's not YOUR story.