To Write

My stance on enjoying the struggle of writing.

Dated: 10/13/26
Publish: 10/15/26
Reading time: ~2 min read

Related: draw your own lines. Below is essentially one of my lines.

My Stance On Writing

I stand that
writing with a language model is
one of the most detrimental choices you could make in your life.

Please, please, never allow a model to write for you.

If you're a young person
this page is me metaphorically dropping to my knees, begging you…
in hopes I'll leave an imprint you never forget.

Desirable Difficulties

The struggle to review and endlessly revise your writing is a desirable difficulty. [1] ¹

You want this.

There is no substitute for the friction of thoughts flowing through your fingers.

What About Reviewing My Writing?

I'd even go as far as to say…
never (yes, never) have a model review your writing. ²

My reasoning for this is because you'll dull your senses.
You'll lack the ability to criticize your own work.

Trying to read through some model's bullshit output about
"you should change this and this and this" is shooting yourself in the foot.
Even if the model does come up with some feedback that you agree with…
then you gotta decide how to incorporate it…
Just spare yourself and don't go down that road.

By the time you've tried to parse through a bunch of model output, you could have already revised it once yourself.
With each revision you've built a stronger intution around the words you're trying to shape.
Maybe your next revision is worse, while the next one is much better.
You'll never build an intuition following a model's advice on your writing.

What Is Reasonable Then?

An acceptable use case might be to
do research or
find relevant sources for inspiration or references to support your claims.

Otherwise, forget about it.

References

[1]

R. A. Bjork, “Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings,” in Metacognition: Knowing about knowing, J. Metcalfe and A. P. Shimamura, Eds., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 185–205. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/4561.003.0011.

Acronyms

LLM Large Language Model 1

Notes

This reference "desirable difficulty" may be somewhat loose.
Bjork's work focuses on scenarios with a teacher, but
here I'm talking about struggling with your writing alone.

Maybe the reference is reasonable.
Even with a teacher, you still must do the hard work independently.

The section I've referenced is "Reducing Feedback to the Learner".
It says giving too much feedback and too early of feedback can hinder a learner.

So, in the context of getting feedback from a Large Language Model (LLM) on your writing,
I'm postulating that the feedback is a hindrance.

An exception to this rule might be: spelling or grammatical checks.
If you're not a native English speaker and filling out a job application, sure.
Otherwise, I enjoy broken English. Often I'm joking around, trying to use the least amount of words to express what I mean…