Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips These blog posts are longer, i.e., don’t have many words. Sorry, I can’t help myself. My blog posts aren’t very long (see, I could have shortened that sentence by removing the word “very” and also the word “blog.”). I recently wrote about the Paramedic Method of Editing. That method helps editors shorten […]

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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 If “big” is in the description, it is in all the descriptions. That hurts. Here is a process for writing a big document: Uh, this usually means a BIG waste of resources. The BIG draft means the writer works and works and works. Finally, finished. The BIG review means half-a-dozen people read […]

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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 Writers can write more than we do. Is this lazy? And, by the way, lazy was the worst thing in the world according to my mother, so that comments stings. Writers in 2026 are for the most part lazy. — Dean Wesley Smith Mr. Smith’s comment stings. According to my mother, there […]

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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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by Dwayne Phillips These chattering bots merely predict the next N word(s). Software has been doing this for many years—nothing new here. In the 1990s (yes, 30 years ago, I am that old), word processors started guessing what word we were trying to type. Some called that “auto complete.” It was nice. Not perfect, but […]

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