Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips College professors and other educators continue to struggle needlessly with writing assignments and AI-regurgitated text. Here we have yet another story of a teacher with the best of intentions trying to have students write papers in the era of the current slate of AI systems that pump out text at the push […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes, you have to work hard to untangle what someone is trying to convey. Then again, if their words are tangled, maybe they don’t have anything to convey. I spend much of my days untangling the words of others. Long documents; long talks, and the like. What is that person trying to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Writing is a skill (and an art). How do you improve a skill? Do it again tomorrow. Here is some old advice to improving as a writer: write everyday. I don’t have all the quotes to repeat here. I wish I did. I wish I could give credit to those who have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If it is important to me to tell others what I think, I write it myself. If it is just stuff that a machine could write, let the machine write it. I write this blog. I sit in the coffee shop on Saturday mornings and press every key on the keyboard to […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Writers seem to struggle to express the lot of the average person. Let’s talk about the average savings of an American in their 50s, i.e., born in the 1970s. We want to understand their lot in life and all that. The figures are somewhere. Hmm, average means to sum everyone’s savings and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are occasions when we spend the resources to have everyone in the same room at the same time. We can do this review and do this meeting asynchronously. The documents are online. Everyone review them when they have time today and leave your comments —said an eternal optimist. We have some […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I find, or re-find, a basic concept of writing non-fiction. I recently worked through a piece of rewriting and revision. I used several AI systems combined with the best writing advice I accumulated through the years. When it was over, I attempted a summary. Surely there was something to pin on the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I guess we live in an age where we have to state this, even though many disbelieve. If the grammar is too good, AI must have written it. If the style has changed, AI must have written it. If fill-in-the-blank, AI must have written it. It is possible to write with good […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I receive about one phone call a week from an actual person. What happened? I have a cell phone. I still have a landline phone. Several times a day, the landline rings and a nice computer voice tells me about home improvement. These computer voices are becoming nicer. I guess that is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I find an old method of editing that I was using without knowing it. I recently discovered the paramedic method of editing from UCLA professor Richard Lanham. I think I have been using this method for years without knowing it had a formal beginning and technique. I referred to what I was […]

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