Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips These new chattering bots like ChatGPT are great word multipliers. Do we need word multipliers? That is the question. Try this at home: I am now up to 2,500 words in ten minutes. In another ten minutes I will have 5,000 words. In an hour I will have 50,000 words. 50,000 words […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Back to a basic: write with nouns and verbs. It brings us closer to brevity and clarity. Those are pretty good places to be. I was reminded of this short and powerful writing tip this past week. And yes, it was from Strunk and White. They used the title of the post […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Are you not a writer? Really. Just type the words you say. “You must understand, Dwayne, you are a writer,” several people over the years. Yes, I am cursed or blessed to be “a writer.” What do I do? I put my fingers on the keyboard and type the words that come […]

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by Dwayne Phillips To write is to be misunderstood. Gosh, not very optimistic but it is realistic. We should constantly ask, “Did my words make sense?” “Never mind what it says, we know what we mean,” said an optimist about something we were reading. Yes, we did know what it meant. We read it half-a-dozen […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes we fight against something with all our might only to discover that are foe is ourselves and what we do everyday. As I write this, there is a writer’s strike in Hollywood. Note, I am not in Hollywood writing this as a writer who is on a writer’s strike. Now that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips This is another fundamental of written communications that we seem to have forgotten—the humble abbreviation. Let’s abbreviate: The last item in the list is confusing, but given the context we always know what that means, right? Sorry, we don’t. I contend that we should not use abbreviations any longer. 98.6% of the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Some people are using text-generating software to write a book a day. The world changes daily. Some people change while some don’t. Here is a story about some folks in India(?) who are putting several books a day every day onto online book sellers. The same bunch of folks are writing glowing […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I don’t want to jump into the next book-writing project at home. Or do I? I just finished a writing project at home. Done, wrapped up, self-published on the places where my friends and relatives can by it for 99¢. Sigh. I don’t want to jump into the first thing that pops […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We tend to want complex things. Too simple shows that we didn’t work hard, right? No, that is usually wrong. It happened again at work this week… Someone wanted a couple of sentences that summarized a project. The project had been running for ten years and is a success. Lots of people […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In the past month or two, many have bemoaned the appearance of software that can write essays for students. I have yet to read concerns about software that teachers can use to write essay assignments. ChatGPT is ruining the world. Well, at least some folks think it is ruining their world. The […]

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