Working Up

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 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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