Deep Work in Writing, Editing, and Coaching

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We’re always reflecting on how our editing and academic coaching adds value to the world. We think a big piece of it has to do with helping people find deep work. This is a pretty good piece of a mission statement.

Cal Newport outlined deep work in his 2016 book:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

In contrast, shallow work is:

Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

Newport argued that shallow work has consumed knowledge workers with an endless barrage of distraction and triviality. Since 2016, social media, recommendation algorithms, and advertising-driven internet content have gotten even better at harvesting and fragmenting our capacity for sustained attention.

This barrage of distraction has has robbed us of the ability to enjoy the rewards of a hard day’s cognitive work. The hunger for deep work is palpable. We think we can help.

Deep Work and Writing

Writing is ideally deep work. Every writer dreams of that sort of undistracted, retreat-like calm where ideas can take shape. But we all know that most writing happens under external pressures of all kinds, and with the ever-present distractions of emails, texts, social media, and/or coworkers.

The route to deep work is straightforward but long. It takes time to let the mind settle and collect into a state of readiness for deep work—often much longer than we’d like. In our experience, the typical time to really settle the mind is about 20 minutes. That’s the first step. Then, once settled, we must feel around for that brain-wave that’s challenging but not too challenging. This takes time too; we cannot say how long. It’s intensely rewarding to be in the flow of writing. Sometimes it feels endlessly sustainable, but we all know that the flow can be fragile: an unexpected phone call, a delivery, a small crisis to manage, a funny meme, or an irritated email might be all it takes to bring us right out of the zone.

Unfortunately, this is not what most knowledge work looks like.

It’s hard to regain the flow once it’s lost. There seems to just be something primal about our attention that doesn’t allow quick re-orienting to deep work. And the more distracted we get, the more frustrating the process gets. It needs to be said: settling the mind is skilled work, and it depletes our limited resources.

Our coaching work so far has involved collaborative searching with our clients for ways to afford deep work against some real barriers to it. We coach what we know, so we help grad students remember their (often vast) capacity for deep work that has been undermined by the overwork of academia, financial stress, systemic barriers, anxiety, and endless distraction. We think we help by sharing what worked for us and what didn’t, by validating the struggle, and in saving our clients time as they search for that minimal viable setup with which to finish the dissertation.

Deep Work and Editing

Our editing value-add is more straightforward. If you, as a writer, have been working deeply, we can help you work more deeply. For writers and academics, there are two goals: write a lot and to write well. Figuring out how to do both is your deep work; everything else is comparatively trivial. There’s no inherent reason for editing be deep work for every writer. Division of labour is our friend.

Writers have to make endless decisions in their work, so it’s no wonder that the editing step feels like one set of decisions too many. Decision fatigue is real, and we think that writers write best when they’re not harried by urgent but comparatively minor decisions. Those things throw writers out of their zones.

Editing may not be first-order creative work, but it is sometimes second-order creative work. It involves empathy, imagination, and a certain kind of passion for clear, actionable suggestions so that the first-order creative work can shine through. We mingle our labour with writers not to diminish their work, but to offer breadcrumb trails into deeper work. Sometimes, we think of editing work as converting a writer’s free-floating anxiety into a set of specific problems for them to solve and feel good about.

The Collective Attention Deficit Disorder

We think our work helps. But let’s be real: the onslaught of shallow work is a systemic issue. No small group of people can turn back the tide of social media, hyper-connectivity, distractions, pressures, and the mess of the working world. Huge fortunes depend on harvesting our attention in order to produce “engagement” and “eyeballs on ads”. But we shouldn’t become passive and pessimistic. In response to the madness of the modern internet, we must all do our part to reclaim our attention, almost as a spiritual practice. That broad project will help all of us find deeper work, deeper rest, deeper relating, and deeper feeling.

Artificial Intelligence, Writing, and Editing (Part 5): Reckoning and Judgment

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The public discussion that started with ChatGPT continues. It now concerns language models (LLMs) in general, most recently with the (troubled) launches of Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney. There’s deep fear that LLMs will completely disrupt writing, editing, and knowledge work in general. The media’s hot take treadmill thinks that AI is coming for our jobs sooner than we thought!

We disagree, and today we’ll revisit an earlier discussion of this matter. We think that LLMs really are game-changing, but the fear around them is overblown. We’ve written about this here, here, here and here, so take a look if the rabbit-hole calls to you. Our arguments are based on the fundamental limitations of currently existing LLMs. If you’re comfortable with a bit of mathiness, this article is an accessible but deep overview of the relevant terrain.

LLMs can’t yet supplant human judgment, because current machine learning methods aren’t made to do that.

Reckoning and Judgment

In a rigorous, opinionated, and accessible overview of the state of AI, philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith distinguishes two very different kinds of human capacities: reckoning and judgment.

Reckoning is a matter of calculative prowess. It involves our capacities to gather, manipulate, and apply information. Reckoning tasks pervade our lives, but computers are far, far better than us in most of them. We have outsources many reckoning tasks to computers. For example, we typically no longer memorize phone numbers and addresses; our phones’ reckoning powers are perfectly adequate to the task.

Judgment is different. It’s much closer to home. It is the normative ideal to which we hold full-blooded human intelligence. He defines it as

a form of dispassionate deliberative thought, grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action, appropriate to the situation in which it is deployed.

Cantwell Smith 2019, 17

Our evaluations of ourselves and others primarily depend on our judgment capacities. (More reckoning ability is better, all else equal. But all else is almost never equal.) The capacities that go into judgment are many, but they all relate to connecting knowledge, action, and responsibility in a very fluid and context-sensitive way. There are no definitive ways of having or developing good judgment. It’s the ultimate context-sensitive skill, and its development underlies many other capacities that we value like justice, insight, creativity, or leadership.

It would be very strange to decide to go to war based only on recommendations from even the best LLMs. Even if the LLM pulled together a vast amount of information, the final decision is a matter of committed human deliberation given the stakes.

Might algorithms one day make social and political decisions on their own? Maybe. But we wouldn’t let them do it unless we had already vetted their judgment in the same way that we vet other humans’ judgment. Vetting judgment is hard, and we often fail to do it well. (Think of our political systems and the people who rise to the top in them. They are typically not the best of us.)

Machines Learn Reckoning, but Use Our Judgment

It’s useful to keep reckoning and judgment in mind when thinking about LLMs. Their reckoning ability is genuinely impressive. They can pull together a decent essay on almost any topic on which human discourse exists. They can set us up with plausibly relevant information and a decent template amazingly quickly. Where LLMs tend to fail (or wobble) is in their judgment. This has been noticed in many different ways since LLMs entered the public sphere.

Behind every AI is a pile of human judgment. Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash.

For example, LLMs will often err on the side of overwriting or offering related, but not-quite-on-point information when asked to write about some topic. Figuring out the right level of conciseness is a judgment call that humans often fail at.

There’s room for pushback here. Isn’t it impressive how far LLMs have come in the last few years? They’ve gone from writing chronically incoherent text to doing at least a decent job with most long-form text. That’s fair, but this is an advance in reckoning capacity, not in judgment.

We don’t even know how to start automating judgment. Whatever decent judgment LLMs show is not a function of automated learning methods. It’s added to the LLM in a step called “reinforcement learning from human feedback” (RLHF). The companies behind LLMs have, in essence, outsourced the judgment task to low-paid “digital sweatshops” in developing countries.

This is not widely known for obvious reasons. But the omission of RLHF makes many people think that machine learning has accomplished more than it has. While LLMs have made a genuine breakthrough with respect to reckoning tasks around natural language, but they have not made any progress on judgment. The open secret of AI research is that we don’t know how to make the leap into genuine machine judgment.

It’s important to keep reckoning and judgment separate in our minds. Fortunately, the distinction is fairly intuitive. Failing to be clear here risks giving away what’s valuable about human thought to the LLMs. We humans are not especially good at math, or reckoning, or fast calculation. Our brains consume about as much power as a 120 watt light bulb. But our capacity to deliberate, and to refine our approach to the world remains unparalleled. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best judgment capacity there is.

Machine Map, Human Territory

LLMs talk about the thunderstorms, taxes, cats, and whatever else you prompt them to do. But they don’t really know about thunderstorms, taxes, and cats. What they know are exquisitely intricate patterns of how we use language around the weather, taxes, and cats, which allows them to carry on coherently and sometimes even insightfully about these topics.

Recognizing that our conceptual maps are not the same thing as the world itself is an exercise of judgment. As the ChatGPT website says, one of the key limitations of the model’s training is that “there is currently no source of truth” for the model. (Side note: LLMs can talk about the difference between the words and the things the words refer to, but this is only because our language has these patterns.) Current LLMs are “worldless”. They can talk about our world, but until they have a world of their own, it will be impossible to get them to appreciate the difference between the map and the territory themselves.

So What?

We should not take our capacities for judgment lightly. To debase our judgment now before the reckoning capacities of LLMs would be an ethical and political failing on a grand scale.

Coming back to something we discussed in our very first post on this topic, the bigger problem than the capacities of LLMs is the fear born of ignorance around them. So learn how these systems work. Once you know what they can and can’t do, you will be less disoriented. And carry on refining your judgment; indeed, it’s all we need to prove our value.

From Inspiration to Perspiration: Draft 2 and Beyond

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Elsewhere, we have written about the qualities of draft -1, draft 0, and draft 1. We offer these because starting to write can feel very different day-to-day, and sometimes minute-by-minute. Before we explore the natural extension of this series—draft 2 and beyond—let’s recap.

The Inner Game of Drafting

Draft -1 is where you start on the hardest days, when there are factors actively undermining your writing effort. The goal for draft -1 is to just do anything. Any kind of activity related to the writing will do: it doesn’t matter if it’s clear, in words, in images, or in doodles. Draft 0 is where you start when you don’t have any momentum, but aren’t actively struggling. The goal for draft 0 is to write something to rough completion, without the nattering of the editor-brain or worries for the future. in draft 0 you write for yourself. Draft 1 is where you start when you have some inner momentum—a compelling idea, a fascinating kernel, or the good kind of deadline pressure. The goal of draft 1 is to make something passable to your ideal reader.

Draft -1 and draft 0 are often called the pre-writing stage in distinction to writing. We choose to emphasize the continuity between writing and pre-writing, because the real secret of patient, persistent, and productive writing is the skill of shifting between these three modes as circumstances dictate. Just as the experienced driver shifts gears as needed, so writers should have these different modes of engagement in their toolbox. If the writing is going well, we might upgrade to draft 1 mode. If the writing is hitting a rough patch, maybe dropping to draft -1 is a way to keep engaged with the inner game of writing. The bigger your writing project, the more indispensable these skills become.

Beyond Draft 1

Many people think of making a fairly coherent draft as being done with the writing. Sadly, the difference between an OK piece of writing and a good piece of writing is most often drafting. Depending on context, re-drafting may take up most of the effort of the project. Even in areas of writing where the cultural scripts around inspiration and the value of raw, unedited writing predominate, re-drafting is actually the norm.

What is the difference between draft 1 and draft 2? The key thing about draft 2 is that it feels like re-doing a project already done. You’ve hit that natural stopping point already, so some part of you will resist revisiting the piece.

What about the difference between draft 2 and draft 3? The differences between multiple drafts become less distinct at this point in writing, but a few general features seem to hold.

Draft upon draft. Patiently and persistently.

First, the more drafts we do, the more writer-brain recedes and editor-brain comes to the fore. The critical thoughts you needed to put aside to write the piece are now essential for getting the details right.

Second, the higher the draft count, the more we are editing our material to fit with our imagined audience. For many of us, this also causes some anxiety. There is also the problem that across multiple drafts our intended audience might shift. Keep an eye out for that.

Third, the more drafts we write, the more we will feel like we have absolutely no interest in this piece of writing, no matter how we may have felt about it at the beginning. There’s a joke in academia: you’re ready to submit a paper when you hate it with all your being. This is not that far from the truth. The more you draft, there more will end up with a piece of writing that reads well, but that you will kind of hate.

In the Depths of Later Drafts

Losing interest, connection, and vitality in the writing project as you re-draft is completely normal. In fact, it’s a cue that you might be nearing completion. There is, towards the end of the writing process, a temptation to give up on the project just before it’s ready. During this difficult phase, we have to tap into perspiration because inspiration is not available.

There isn’t much actionable advice for this stage. Try to give yourself some sleep cycles between drafts. If you draft too quickly, you may not be maximizing the effect of having fresh eyes on your writing. Accept and commit to the grind that the last few phases of drafting involve. Perhaps remind yourself, if you can, of why you started this writing project in the first place. Chances are that by this point, the lack of interest is concealing a basic sense of efficacy. While in earlier drafts you may have been trying to figure out the main point of your writing, in later stages you know your main point and fiddling with the details of how to convey it.

The unfortunate truth is that falling out of love with the piece of writing is almost inevitable with re-drafting. That said, the grind can be rewarding, at least some of the time. Being able to re-draft effectively is a rare skill, and it helps writing stand out. Of course, everyone has a natural stopping point for re-drafting. Editors can help when you hit that wall.

Self-Care (Part 3): Kindness for Writers

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In the reflection that started this year we talked about the importance of kindness in achieving your goals. Being kinder to ourselves is wonderful aspiration, but often the specifics of how to do it are lacking. Many people who talk about kindness use inspirational or flowery language to paper over the gaps. So today we’ll try to say a few specific things about how to be kind to ourselves in the writing process.

Generally speaking, kindness flows is context-sensitive ways. We’re naturally wired to be kind to babies, kittens, other small fuzzy animals, and the like. Adult-to-adult kindness is more complicated. Kindness to ourselves is usually counterintuitive, especially when we most need it. We really don’t have a comprehensive theory of how to get kinder to ourselves. We doubt that anyone does. And yet, it’s perhaps the deepest factor in a sustainable and productive writing practice.

Kindness in Writing

Developing kindness in writing is lifelong process. Being kinder is mostly an inner game of gradually tweaking our habits with great patience and persistence. Advice from athletic and martial arts training is relevant, with suitable modifications.

Today we’ll look at four cases where kindness helps, but where it is hard to tap into.

Mind-Wandering

First, there’s the case where we find our mind has wandered. How we catch ourselves and bring ourselves back makes all the difference. Do we get annoyed with our flighty habits or do we find a moment to appreciate the skill with which we caught ourselves? We have to train our minds like we train puppies to sit. Too much sternness is counterproductive. Not enough firmness is also counterproductive. Find the happy middle.

Working patiently, persistently, and kindly.

It’s important to accept that we only catch ourselves in distraction a shockingly small amount of the time. No writer is a distraction-free ninja on their first, or 2000th try. We need to do endless reps to strengthen the noticing muscle. Encourage yourself with a bit of kindness.

Writer’s Block

Second, there’s the case of facing down writer’s block. Typically, when we hit that wall, we are disappointed in ourselves and habitually generate tension. That tension crushes any hope of an idea actually emerging, since it locks us into very tight, black-and-white patterns of physical and mental activity. So much of writer’s block is spiralling in writer’s block. Kindness here often boils down to letting go. Let go of any obvious tension. A few deep breaths help. Taking a time-out helps. Whatever little thing you can do to slow the spiral. In time, the spirals get less rapid and recovery comes naturally.

Editor Brain

Third, there’s the case of reviewing what you’ve written and not liking it. How do we make the editor brain more kind? By keeping it focused on the task at hand! Also by keeping it from spinning out into endless, unhelpful inferences. (You know the ones: about your capability as a writer, about yourself as a virtuous person, about your writing as a whole, about other people’s imagined reactions to your early drafts.) Editor brain and its sharp criticism has a role to play in the writing process, but it should be limited to cleaning up this piece of writing. Editor brain is not the karmic judge of your life! Constraining editor brain to its role allows other parts of you to remind you that you are a worthy person regardless of anything specific you do.

Hitting the Wall

Fourth, there’s the experience of losing all motivation, but with a deadline looming. You are aware you should rest and regroup, but it’s not possible. What to do then? The unkind, perhaps habitual response is to coerce the animal energies of your mind and body: to press them into service with tension and mostly unspoken threats. But the counterintuitive move to kindness can actually increase our energy reserves! Accept the wall. Investigate the wall, not to find ways through it, but just to appreciate this experience of being stuck, in this moment, right now. Because stuckness is an integral part of the writerly life, of human life in general. And maybe this will loosen things. Sometimes the stuck places are doors to different rooms. Other times they really are solid walls. Sometimes the only kind thing to do is to crash. This is not a failure; it’s life.

Accept, Observe, Re-Commit

All this boils down to a simple formula: accept, observe, re-commit. Accept the difficulty, whatever it is. Let it exist and be felt. Observe how it comes and goes, how it feels, what the difficulty says, and so on. And then, once enough time has passed, re-commit to the thing you were doing.

The process looks simple, but it’s not. Our ability to do it depends on how kind we are. This sets up a chicken-and-egg paradox. The kinder we are the more we can grow our capacity for kindness by intervening on our behaviour and attitudes. And the more we grow our capacity for intervention, the kinder we can get. We suppose there’s a wonderful promise there: the inner endgame of writing is a wonderful, virtuous circle. But, of course, the start of the process will be clunky and it may seem to go nowhere for a long time. We have to be kind to ourselves when we start too.

How? Well, as we start we have to get inspiration from anywhere we can. Here’s a baptismal speech for newborn twins from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Maybe it will help you.

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

The Zen of Writing (Part 4): Failure

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Today we return to a series we’ve been developing on the Zen of writing. We started by examining the aspiration to achieve flow while writing, then looked at how we can build a scaffold to afford flow, then looked at how to implement that scaffold under less than ideal circumstances. We refer to these ideas in many of our other posts as well. Today we acknowledge and explore an important part the journey to flow: failure.

Most cultural scripts train us to avoid failure at all costs. Even though most people agree that tying and failing essential for getting good at anything, we nevertheless shrink away from failure when things get hard. These scripts make dwelling on failure and its lessons seem defeatist or scary. It need not be. Reflection on failure is one of the best ways to prevent the catastrophic, damaging kind of failure and to encourage the safer, educational kind.

To make any progress, we must interrogate the cultural scripts and mindsets around failure.

Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset

There are two mindsets around any kind of skilled performance: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

In the fixed mindset, we treat our key traits—intelligence, sensitivity, creativity—as immutable. The natural consequence of this is that we don’t want to show others our lack of skill when it counts, in case we don’t measure up. So we get very cautious and perfectionistic.

You’ve hit an obstacle. What do you do? Fixed and growth mindsets suggest different actions.

In the growth mindset, we treat the same traits as things we can develop with patience and persistence. Success is an opportunity to refine our traits. Failure is an even better opportunity to refine them, since it typically sends a much stronger signal.

All the research we know shows that the growth mindset is a more accurate description of reality than the fixed mindset. While skill, talent, and aptitude are not distributed equally, any given skill is more malleable than it might appear. But while the growth mindset is more accurate, the fixed mindset is more pervasive.

This is probably because of few factors: a test-based model of education, the fact that the media shows us the products of incredibly skilled people (actors, musicians, writers) without showing us the process by which they got those skills, explaining skill by talent or genius, and many more tendencies. We may explore these stories in future posts.

To learn, develop, and refine our skills, we must resist the fixed mindset whenever possible. How do we do that? In a slogan: we must learn to fail safely.

Failing Safely

It might seem odd to bring failure and safety together. Cultivating a sense that it’s OK to risk and fail is a long-term project. Much of it involves unearthing and challenging cultural scripts that reinforce the fixed mindset around writing. We write about draft 0 and draft -1 a fair amount because we think starting there, rather than at draft 1, is an important piece of making space within yourself for experimentation, re-negotiation, and reworking. Writing draft -1 makes the stakes are nearly non-existent, so there’s almost no such thing as failure. The stakes are a bit higher with every subsequent draft. At some point, your drafts may become public, at which point the cost of failure increases.

Having a solid drafting practice allows us to write those half-baked, incomplete, fragmentary, not-quite-sure thoughts, and then to select and remix them as appropriate. We should do most of our failing there. In tour private, early drafts you can let the failure flow along with the success, surprise, and excitement! And the more we work and rework, the more public failure becomes a teacher rather than a mortifying experience.

Editors like us work as midwives for moving between the personal realm and the public realm. We’re here to offer you feedback, which raises the stakes for you, but in a non-judgmental and non-public way. Being writers ourselves, we know in our bones what the stakes are.

When we look at prolific writers, we often wonder how they can turn out so much quality content. Rest assured that all of them have harrowing stories of failure in their biographies. But they survived and even thrived. You can too. It starts with owning a piece of our fear of failure. What is a first step you can take along the path of learning to fail safely?

Artificial Intelligence, Writing, and Editing (Part 4): AI Writing Copilots

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AI has really come into the writing mainstream over the last two years, causing great excitement and anxiety. Here at CDWC, we are following these developments with great interest. We have already written about AI and editing here, here, and here. Today we’ll explore how AI tools are impacting the writing process, and what this means for writers.

AI Writing Copilots

There are now many AI tools that help writers: SudoWrite, Jasper.ai, Lex, Laika, ChatGPT, and GPT-3. Many of these tools are still in the beta testing phase (we’re still waiting in line for Lex), but they have already impacted the zeitgeist. The benefits are obvious. The AI copilot allows writers to focus on the big picture while it does the sentence-by-sentence and phrase-by-phrase grunt work. It’s like having an overly enthusiastic intern writing your first draft for you.

How are these AI tools used? A recent WIRED article concluded that AI tools most commonly help with writer’s block. Writers also use AI tools for summarizing and early-draft editorial commentary. These are still early days. We think that AI will eventually impact every step of the writing process: planning, pre-writing, drafting, and revision. But for now AI copilots mainly help with pre-writing and drafting.

AI Copilots and Writer’s Block

We’ve written about the struggle against writer’s block extensively, so we are very interested in whether AI tools are potential game-changer. So let’s dig in a bit!

Current AI copilots are good at taking in a large chunk of text as input and generating plausible continuations. Such continuations can help us power through a tedious transition, or they may stir up some ideas, or it may generate some passable text that we as human writers can improve on.

Less time typing means more time for strategic thinking.

Tedious transitions are big energy wasters, and since our writing energy is mostly limited, it makes sense to use AI to help us stay in the zone. This somewhat resembles the advice to change the medium of writing as a way to reframe around a blockage. In a sense, there isn’t a big difference between switching from laptop to notebook and switching from a word processor to your AI assistant. Similarly, prompting your AI assistant is not that different from doodling, or externally processing a sticking point. Also, we all know that starting with bad or mediocre text is sometimes better than not starting at all. If AI helps you generate such text, more power to you!

Discernment

As with all uses of AI, it’s important to be discerning. As writers, we should get clear on our tendencies around writer’s block and where we need help. Perhaps you as a blocked writer only need a couple of sentences as a nudge. Perhaps you need a paragraph or two to get you to reflect more on the general direction of your thinking (as parsed by an attentive AI). We should also be clear on what the AI copilot’s capacities and sensibilities are. As it stands, AI copilots produce fairly middling text: competent but not remarkable. They excel in reading what you’ve written and engaging with the content, though not the intention behind the writing.

A lot depends on the specific AI assistant you are using. Stay tuned for a more in-depth post on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the systems.

AI Copilots and Pre-Writing Strategies

AI copilots can also be used before you write anything. Some of them (e.g., ChatGPT) are remarkably good at writing decent text based on natural-language prompts. This is excellent fodder for brainstorming. We’ve already written about draft -1 and draft 0 as tools for writers to slip into writing when it feels difficult or impossible. There we considered using image generation AI as a way of getting the creative juices flowing. We consider AI writing copilots as part of that toolkit.

Another note on discernment: we think that a writer’s responsibility is to be (relatively) clear on their intention with a piece of writing. As of today, the intention behind language remains the exclusive purview of human intelligence. We shouldn’t give it away to the AI. As of today, it’s not possible anyway, and all indications point to the mechanization of the meaning behind writing being quite far off, if it ever arrives.

Don’t let the AI copilot disrupt your intention. If all is going well, you’re in a creative dance with a remarkable piece of technology. Lead that creative dance! AI copilots, without clear intention guiding their output, will tend towards the most generic text possible. (We are working on a future post dedicated to the details of why this is.) And we don’t necessarily want that!

AI Copilots and Editing

As things currently stand, AI copilots aren’t great with large-scale text structure: plot lines, argument outlines, asides, the subtler aspects of sequencing and repetition. So we editors are safe, for now—developmental editors in particular. But if you think of an AI copilot as a fresh computational pair of eyes on your text, with all its limitations and different sensibility, you might have great success in the early stages of brainstorming and planning a piece of writing. Getting this right will take experimentation. Developing “feel” for what the AI can help with is an extended process. Once again, there’s no substitute for clear intention and discernment, and the knowledge of your writing goals and tendencies.

An AI editor has no ego in the game, nor does it understand that you have your ego in the game! in a way, it can be radically honest with you, and its feedback may be easier to take in. The writer-editor relationship is a delicate thing that requires care; it can be greatly beneficial, but only if both parties are clear about their intentions. An AI editor doesn’t have the social graces of human editor, but for some types of editing that’s not a problem.

Once again, keep your wits about you. AI systems have many sneaky biases. They are also very good at seeming confident even if the have failed to grasp the basics. Experience and experimentation are essential if you are to lead in the dance. Good luck with it!

The Existential Pleasures of Getting Edited and Coached

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Happy Lunar New Year this weekend! May it inaugurate a time of greater peace, balance, and wholesome achievement! As we wrote last week, let your aspirations fly! We’re here to help you to convert aspiration into action.

We know that many of you want to write more, more effectively, and with less friction. We are here to help in two general ways. First, we provide a full-stack editing experience. No matter the level or polish of your writing, we can help to improve it. Second, we provide coaching so that you can make writing happen in a more existentially wholesome way. Today we’ll reflect on the existential pleasures of being edited and coached.

Getting Edited

Everybody thinks of getting edited as a negative experience. It’s important to acknowledge that. Depending on how attached we are to our writing, getting edited feels somewhere between mildly and extremely vulnerable. It’s like going to the dentist. We know it’s good for us, but even if the dentist is kind, careful, and courteous, you’re still going to deal with some mix of awkwardness, pain, or discomfort.

We’ve been there, which is why we take great care to make editing as painless as possible. To push the dental analogy further: not every experience at the dentist is equally awkward or painful. A checkup is easier than getting a cavity filled, which is easier than getting a root canal. Different kinds of editing affect the writing ego differently. Proofreads are the easiest. Copyedits are a bit harder. Structural edits are harder, and developmental edits are the hardest of all. But, just like with dentistry, deep interventions can fix a lot of pain. And the deeper we go, the more care we take not to strike those nerves.

That said, getting edited can be deeply fulfilling. Getting edited is also like taking music or art lessons. While lessons bring out all the ways in which our skills are limited, they also provide a roadmap so that, bit by bit, we no longer need lessons. Editing creates opportunities for building awareness of our tendencies, for learning how to intervene on those tendencies, for growing as writers, for learning humility before the endless task of communicating well.

These are not the only pleasures of getting edited. Sometimes, all we need as writers is another person to notice and validate us. Editor validation is a fairly straightforward thing: while we often focus on the negative tendencies, we also notice what’s working. Working with a supportive editor is an investment in getting clearer about what you want out of writing, and, perhaps, making connections and reflecting on your writing.

Getting Coached

Our academic coaching is a direct outgrowth of our experience as editors, educators, and academics. Fundamentally, coaching is about scaffolding our client’s growth in the medium-to-long term. It’s been a rewarding process for our clients and for us.

Growing, wherever you may be. Photo by Shlomo Shalev on Unsplash.

Scaffolding growth looks very different across our clients, because their circumstances are quite different. In general, we are here to provide clear and honest feedback about where they seem stuck, and to offer solutions that might work, both from our experience and from general principles and research. Ideally, we gear our feedback to help clients fail better. This sounds more harsh than it is: failure is an excellent teacher, perhaps the best teacher. Its lessons stick in a uniquely long-lasting way. If a client has the mental space to indulge in a growth mindset, this is the direction we take: we go to the pain, to the stuck spots, and spend some careful time there.

Of course, clients often aren’t in ideal circumstances. Clients typically have specific goals in mind with their projects, in which case we have to moderate the pure growth mindset approach. To do this well, we aim to be as clear as we can on our clients’ attitudes—for both our sakes. Getting coached brings up issues, but they should never feel overwhelming. We aim to support people in the way they want to be supported.

In sum, there’s considerable pleasure to be found in getting feedback, whether that comes as editing or coaching. We’re all conditioned to tense up around feedback, but the very process of persevering with it is wonderful growth. We aim to make the experience of getting edited hard but rewarding, like many of the best things in life. As coaches, we also work to instil a positive attitude to hard things, so that you can grow more effectively.

SMART Goal-Setting for the New Year

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Happy New Year! Odds are that many of you have spent the beginning of the year doing some sort of planning and intention-setting. We all hope that 2023 is happier, more rewarding, and more productive. We hope you make progress on that memoir, mystery novel, academic paper, one-act play, dissertation, existential meditation, or whatever draws you to writing!

Of course, hoping is only the beginning. The gap between hope and achievement looms large for all writers. So this week we’ll reflect on how to close the gap. This material is drawn from years of failing to live up to it. You need to have three ideas in your back pocket to write sustainably: SMART goals, dedicated time, and kindness.

SMART Goals

We have already discussed smart goals elsewhere in this blog. As a reminder, they are goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. SMART goals fill the gap between aspirational hopes and day-to-day effort.

We get to SMART goals by breaking down large goals into small ones. We drill down from the shiny, compelling, and vague goal—write a novel, publish an article, and so on—to the SMART goal—rough out the chapters, write three paragraphs, and so on.

How we drill down is, of course, specific to each person, but if you’re looking for some tips and tricks, here are three that have worked for us. We could talk about this endlessly, but we don’t want this post to be endless.

May your writing be as lush as this garden. Photo by Vlad Kutepov on Unsplash.

First, if you’re stuck with a set of difficult tasks, try rating them. We’d recommend a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is a trivially easy task and 10 is a task that induces overwhelming dread. Feel free to tweak the system to suit your needs and actual experience. If a task is too hard—7 or higher, say—use that as a cue to break it down into smaller tasks. Then rate the smaller tasks. Assess whether you’ve made progress in decreasing the difficulty rating. Chances are that you have.

Second, remember that even with large tasks, sometimes the dread of the task is deceptive. With some tasks, knowing the first thing you’re going to do is all you need. This is an old trick we learned from actor friends of ours. For them, the way to handle stage fright is to have a super-clear idea of what they’re doing first when they get on stage. What’s the first line, or the first gesture, or the first action? If we’re prepared, that initial burst sets up everything that follows.

Third, remember that sometimes to get unstuck, you have to eat the frog, i.e., do the hardest thing first. Sometimes, if you can get the hardest bit done you’ll have a nice boost of energy for finishing the other tasks.

Use these tips with discernment. Rating tasks helps train discernment. If you can make rating your tasks second nature, then even being paralyzed with indecision can become a cue that keeps you engaged. It’s a deeply empowering experience to navigate through indecision.

Dedicated Writing Time

Most writing is deep work, taking most of our attention. Deep work is not the kind of work you can start and finish at a moment’s notice. Slipping into writing mode and slipping out of it takes some time because attention takes time to mobilize.

Most writing is deep work, taking most of our attention. Deep work is not the kind of work you can start and finish at a moment’s notice. Slipping into writing mode and slipping out of it takes some time because attention takes time to mobilize.

Kindness

Tips and tricks can only go so far. In the end, the inner game of writing is as important as the products of writing. We must remember to be kind to ourselves. This is the most important thing to remember, and often the hardest. Bullying ourselves into writing will not work in the long run. Our brains and bodies are smarter than that, and sooner or later they will rebel.

There are many ways to nudge ourselves into being a bit kinder to ourselves. Taking time to celebrate writing accomplishments is important. Taking time off when things seem out of balance is also important. Letting your standards slip on some difficult writing days can be a profound act of kindness to yourself. The ways to be kinder are endless. Don’t neglect kindness, even though deadlines might pull you away from it.

So, happy New Year! May you break down your hopes and aspirations into goals that you can do day-by-day. May you look back on this year and see the progress you have made! May you produce, refine, and develop your work. May you be surprised by what you discover. And most of all, may you realize what you want out of writing and get it.

Artificial Intelligence, Writing, and Editing: A “Conversation” with ChatGPT

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There has been immense interest in ChatGPT over the past weeks. Here is a “conversation” with ChatGPT about some of the concerns we’ve raised previously. This conversation has been edited for coherence and clarity. We have not rewritten any of ChatGPT’s output, although we prodded it to be more concise and gave it explicit word counts for its answers. So, while the exchange has the form of a conversational interview, it’s important to keep in mind that we gave the AI some scaffolding.

Clarity Doctors: What do you think is the biggest benefit of AI-assisted writing for academics?

ChatGPT: AI-assisted writing tools can save time, increase efficiency, improve the quality of writing, and provide a platform for collaboration for academics. They can also help overcome writer’s block and find inspiration for new ideas.

CD: Can you say a little more about how AI can help academics or writers in general with finding inspiration for new ideas?

ChatGPT: Certainly! One way that AI-assisted writing tools can help writers to find inspiration for new ideas is by providing prompts or suggestions based on a writer’s previous work or areas of expertise. For example, a tool might analyze a writer’s previous articles or papers and suggest new topics or angles that are related to their existing work. This can be a helpful way to spark new ideas and inspire fresh thinking, as it allows writers to build on their existing knowledge and experience.

CD: Can you think of any ethical pitfalls for writers who use AI tools to analyze and develop their existing writing?

ChatGPT: One potential pitfall is the risk of overreliance on AI tools. While AI tools can be a helpful resource for generating ideas, organizing thoughts, and improving the quality of writing, it is important for writers to retain their own critical thinking and creative judgment. Writers should not blindly rely on AI tools to do all of the work for them, and should take the time to carefully review and revise their writing to ensure that it accurately reflects their own ideas and arguments.

Another ethical pitfall to consider is the potential for AI tools to perpetuate biases that may exist in the data that they are trained on. For example, if an AI tool is trained on a dataset that is heavily skewed towards one perspective or demographic, it may produce biased or unbalanced results when applied to other writing. Writers should be aware of this potential pitfall and take steps to ensure that their use of AI tools does not perpetuate biases in their own work.

An image of a person shaking hands with a robot.
An AI-generated image seems appropriate. (Prompt: “A writer talking to herself in a mirror, but the reflection is a robot”.) Courtesy of craiyon.com.

Finally, writers should be mindful of intellectual property and copyright issues when using AI tools. It is important to ensure that any ideas or content generated by AI tools are properly credited and attributed, and to respect the intellectual property rights of others.

CD: Let’s focus on the issue of algorithmic bias that you mentioned. This may be an unfair question to ask an AI language model, but how can writers ensure that they do not perpetuate biases in their own work?

ChatGPT: Thank you for your understanding. There are several ways that writers can address the issue of algorithmic bias when using AI tools. One way is to be aware of the potential for bias in the data that is used to train AI algorithms. If the data used to train an AI algorithm is heavily skewed or unbalanced in some way, the algorithm may produce biased results when applied to other data. Writers can take steps to ensure that they are using diverse and representative datasets when training AI algorithms, and can also carefully review the results produced by the algorithm to ensure that they are not biased.

Another way that writers can address the issue of algorithmic bias is to use multiple AI tools and compare the results produced by each one. This can help to mitigate the risk of relying on a single algorithm that may be biased in some way.

Finally, writers can also seek out AI tools that are specifically designed to address issues of bias, such as tools that use techniques like fair representation learning or adversarial learning to mitigate biases in the data.

CD: Let’s change course somewhat. There have been concerns recently that AI language models, including yourself, are overconfident when giving wildly wrong answers or when promoting misinformation. How would you respond to these accusations?

ChatGPT: AI language models, including myself, are trained on large datasets of text and are designed to generate human-like text based on the patterns and trends identified in that data. While AI language models can be very effective at generating text that is coherent and resembles human language, they are not perfect and may sometimes provide inaccurate or misleading information. This can occur if the data used to train the model contains errors or misinformation, or if the model is asked to generate text based on incomplete or ambiguous information. It is important for users of AI language models to carefully evaluate the output of these models and to use their own critical thinking and judgment when interpreting the information generated by the model.

CD: Can you summarize our conversation thus far? 

ChatGPT: In this conversation, we have discussed the potential benefits of AI-assisted writing tools for academics, including the ability to save time, increase efficiency, and improve the quality of writing. We have also discussed the potential for AI to help writers find inspiration for new ideas through the use of machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques. Additionally, we have discussed the potential ethical pitfalls of using AI tools to analyze and develop writing, including the risk of overreliance on AI and the potential for algorithmic bias. Finally, we have discussed the importance of critical thinking and judgment when evaluating and interpreting the output of AI language models.

CD: Do you have any parting words of wisdom for writers and editors considering using chatGPT or other AI tools to help their writing?

ChatGPT: Use AI tools responsibly, apply critical thinking and judgment, be aware of potential biases, and remember that they are a resource, not a substitute.

Academia and Self-Care (Part 2): Acceptance and Commitment

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As discussed in our previous post on this topic, academics face a tough challenge with self-care because the work has a tendency to become all-consuming for both structural and passion-related reasons. The structures of academic work instil a sense of being behind all the time. The care and passion that academics bring to their topics easily transmutes into perfectionism and self-criticism. Together, these two factors make taking time for self care sometimes feel like self-betrayal.

Here is some sensible advice all academics have received: get better at time management so that you can have more time for self-care without guilt. There’s just a small problem: academic time is unmanageable, ungovernable, and undomesticated—a mess! This mess seeps past even the best-conceived boundaries!

Acceptance

One of us (Alex) was fortunate to get some words of wisdom from his supervisor: “How do I do all the things that are expected of me? I don’t. It’s not possible. The best I can do is to arrange to collapse into a hammock.”

A very academic state of mind. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Wise words! The first step in dealing with a problem is accepting the dark side of our choices. Being an academic just means being a few steps from overwhelm at the best of times, and in overwhelm at the worst of times.

We’ve written about overwhelm in a few places. There’s a plethora of knowledge, skill, and wisdom about how to move through it gracefully. But we have to understand that choosing to be academics means choosing to live with the possibility of overwhelm at all times; it is a choice to learn to dance with it.

More specifically, accepting this situation means accepting that our boundaries between life and work can never be as categorical as those of a 9-to-5 job. They just can’t. Opportunities arise here and there, seemingly randomly. Our working routines might look very different month-to-month. That has some benefit. But it means that rigid boundaries will inevitably break.

Commitment

After acceptance of the bad comes commitment to what is good and worthwhile. Accepting the bad allows a clearer-eyed assessment of the good in academic work.

There’s a kind of freedom, flexibility, and agency that comes from being an academic. Not many people get to exercise as much choice as academics do in what they spend their energy learning and perfecting. (One might say it’s too much choice sometimes!)

Academics are one of the few job categories where understanding the nuances of one’s agency makes a big difference for job satisfaction. Specifically, we need to learn that our boundaries in academia can, at best, be semi-permeable. We need to learn to say no much more and to guard our energy, but we must always be on the lookout for opportunities. It’s an essential part of the ethos!

This constant looking-out makes the schedule unmanageable, but it’s worth it, at least sometimes, to hold the tension. There is, unfortunately, no one-size-fits-all solution here. The right attitude evolves with the ebbs and flows of academic work.

In sum, we need to accept the negatives so that we may enjoy the positives. Whether the positives are worth it is part of a larger conversation.