Also the way 'add a slide' has a 'help me choose' section, that would be useful in the checks section too And for the vertical flow check, I think there's something in the way I've been formatting my slides that isn't getting picked up.

Been playing with this all morning, great stuff. Would be good to be able to leave comments from the checks section as well (e.g., If the Guides check finds that the slide exceeds the margins or uses too many font sizes, would be good to prompt Claude straight from there to fix it; seems like I have to navigate back over to Focus to comment)

feedback on academic writing is my bread and butter, happy to help

The reader isn’t an output of your writing; they’re an input. You don’t find your readers. You produce them in the text.

What's great is not just that you pulled it off, but how well it works. I always read that digest email because there's always something happening in the community that's new and weird in the best way possible

No, it's a psyop from creative writing departments to convince students that it's still worthwhile to pursue an MFA

If you want to drive them mad, point out that Québécois is closer to true French (thanks to centuries of isolation that locked in Ancien Régime features) than the metrapolitan dialect spoken in France (which innovated post-Revolution)

Don’t sleep on Busan!

Full conversation and transcript available on Writer Science, the free newsletter for writers who care about readers writerscience.com/show/6-rul…

Writing advice almost always comes as a list of rules. But Paul Millerd would never presume to tell you how to write. Instead, he'll tell you not to copy him, to do it your own way. So we flipped the genre on its head. Here are the 6 rules of writing that @p_millerd broke in order to keep his writing free.

Been editing this video all day and just realized I’ve got a booger hanging out. Can Claude fix this? 😅

A good point, but to say that writing makes thinking possible is strident. It’s not as though we were unable to think before the advent of writing. You can absolutely think on your own without writing. Probably the strongest argument for the necessary relationship between writing and thinking is that it allows our ideas to be analyzed and refuted—and thus strengthened—by others separated from us by space and time.

Retrieval isnt thinking; it’s remembering ideas that have already been thought. Thinking is problem solving, a subconscious process that precedes its expression in language.

Descriptivists like Kamm are just pollsters: they think the only measure of a language choice is whether it’s made by native speakers. But the relevant question for writers is neither the descriptivist one (is it popular?) nor the prescriptivist one (is it correct?), but the functional one: does it work? An objective basis for answering that third question is found in psycholinguistics. If we understand the reader’s experience—the ways in which certain language choices tax or exploit cognitive faculties—e.g.: working memory (how many details a sentence forces you to hold); mental imagery (how readily a phrase can be pictured, versus abstractions in nominalizations); and negation (the extra work required of flipping a negative statement to its positive form)—then we can make the case that certain constructions are not right or wrong but better or worse, regardless of who wrote it.

It’s been 25 years and I still know all the words 😂

There was a last time I listened to his podcast Making Sense. I miss 2017 Sam, when he would talk to people he disagrees with. Now he’s just another leftist crank

Sheila Heti wrote recently about this granta.com/good-medicine/

Instagram just makes you hate the people you already like