Writing style

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter five, Literary Style, Part One.

No one can have read Miss Keller's autobiography without feeling that she writes unusually fine English.

Any teacher of composition knows that he can bring his pupils to the point of writing without errors in syntax or in the choice of words.

She recognized them at once as her own stories with variations and was much puzzled to know how they could have been published before she was born.

She thinks it is wonderful that two people should write stories so much alike, but she still considers her own as original.

End of chapter five, Literary Style, Part One.

The Story of My Life, Part Three, A Supplementary Account of Helen Keller's Education by John Albert Macy, editor.

It's like, I don't feel like this was the best use of the pages to go in such detail early and then skip a bunch of shit at the climax.

Yeah, personally, I didn't like the writing style, especially when the two characters were in their more chaotic spirals.

Because I felt like the chaos and the internal monologues being a little manic almost meant that a lot of the plot was getting lost because the characters were too busy thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking.

And I'm like, but what is happening? And I found that a lot of the things I thought it would delve into, like addiction and whatever happened to Mallory's brother, what was going on even with Mallory's relationship with her husband, I thought it all kind of got skimmed over and very surfacy.

Most often the people who've purchased that might consider themselves remedial adult writers.

so maybe they struggle with writing when they were young and suddenly all they're doing for work every day regardless of their industry their profession or job title or career self-employed or not is every day everyone is is writing and now of course there's the slop so to speak which is sort of a robotic writing style that when someone sees it you can immediately detect that they're using And so the credibility and the trust in it collapses.

It is just nauseating.

When I read that stuff, I think, why would anybody spend any of their time and money creating or looking or reading or even thinking about this? There's something so...

The, I mean, the, the subtitle, The Shadow the [laughs] I could feel those shadows.

Can you talk about your writing style, your approach to telling the Harpes' story? How many drafts did you write?

Uh.

How much thinking went into the writing craft went into this?

You know? I mean, I think I'm a, I have always been kind of a moody and dramatic writer.

I just haven't kind of let that freak flag fly quite so much because I've mostly been writing for academic audiences.

But, um, yeah, I mean, a, a friend of mine once said that I have a writing style that's almost like Emily Dickinson in that it's almost kind of, it can be kind of staccato, right? Like, very kind of sharp, short.

Like, I use the negative spaces, and I, I sort of leave the reader dangling s- here and there.

Here's a question since we're near the end here.

I was curious, how do you feel about copying writing styles? Like we've talked about, you know, when you copy the actual text and that's not great, but like trying to emulate another author's prose, at what point is that a problem?

Yeah.

I mean, again, when you use AI.

A big shout-out to our listeners in France who have helped put this bulletin in the top 10 digital news podcasts in the country.

In the news now, OpenAI is testing a feature called Writing Style, which would allow ChatGPT to learn your unique writing style by pulling data from your connected applications.

The system could draw inspiration from your Slack messages, your documents in Google Drive or Notion, and your emails in Gmail.

The goal is to reproduce your tone as naturally as possible without you having to constantly provide examples.