alt Hacker NewsI write the words that I hear in my head, as though I am speaking. With the exception of timed, in-class essays, I always turned in papers far in excess of any minimum during high school.
In college, I took a constructive writing course because I thought "Hey, easy A!" After the second or third week, the professor told me that, while the class had a word minimum, I would also be given a separate word maximum. She said I needed to learn brevity and simplicity, before anything else.
The point being: I was able to cruise through high school with my longwindedness as a cheat code, never stressing about minimum lengths, despite my writing being crap in other ways.
Although I have regressed in the two decades since, it helped me a good deal. I am grateful to that professor for doing that.
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I write a lot and have on several occasions tried dictation as an initial draft authoring step. It was trash every time.
Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say.
Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in HN threads like this :)
Then write it down.
You get super high signal writing where every sentence is load bearing. I’ve had people take my documents and share them around the company as “this is how it’s done”
It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. And then several months to implement, even with AI.
I design boardgames and it's easy to write a lot of rules. It's more difficult to write concise rules. Most of my time is spent editing rules to their absolute minimum.
"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal
But how is your writing fast enough that you don’t pause and drown the hearing in your head?
I had the opposite issue. Writing was agony and every section would be written, reviewed and rewritten to get my point across; only to be tortured by a miminum word count that was 20% away after saying all i cound think of saying.
I've gotten better at phrasing myself adequately in one go. Rute mechanical memorization has also made writing itself cheaper. (read my username)
I can now yap quite adequately over text, yet i regularly find AIs at a minimum 2x as verbose as my preferred phrasing after manual word mashing.