tanteMany of the people I do have online conversations with speak English as their first language. I kinda get by but you native speakers really underestimate how hard it is to express oneself in a foreign language. Concepts work differently, metaphors don't really translate, references you have used for decades don't make sense.
Like in German I am actually somewhat eloquent and texts I write don't look like a person with a head injury wrote them.
Impertinenzija@tante If ppl are unable to bring up some really valid points against your reasoning, they will go as low as starting to pick your grammar and wording apart. No surprise there. Don't let them get to you.
poleguy looking for lost tools@Impertinenzija @tante I did not know that his article, that I read very carefully and completely, was not written by a native speaker. I appreciated the content deeply.
I was considering adding a comment though about the irony of discussing the use of LLM for proofreading articles in an article riddled with mistakes.
I didn't post a comment to that effect, but it definitely crossed my mind. I did not feel I had a compelling point to make. But it seems others made the obvious jab.
@poleguy @tante It doesn't matter if it's one's first or second language, everyone makes mistakes, so everything written needs proofreading. But it's become almost a luxury if you're not working in an editor's office or have a publisher getting this second pair of fresh eyes and a well-adjusted brain, or even more. Genius ppl of old used their siblings or wives as unpaid first proofreaders, good Cory has mereley taken the next step and probably trained his LLM on his own works (I assume).
@poleguy @tante I still think the best way to solve this problem as a published (printed) author is by far Don Knuth's approach of giving his nerdy superfan-readers incentive (aka a little treat in form of a cheque with a symbolic amount and a honorary mention in the next edition) if they're first to spot a mistake in "The Art of Computer Programming". But it would be a nightmare on the internet as we know it.
@Impertinenzija @tante I often point out typos in blogs to their authors. Typically I do this on blogs that usually have zero typos and that I know/trust/am familiar with the authors. They typically promptly correct the typo and often say thanks.
However, in a post like this where I hit 10+ typos I do not bother.
I'd by stoked if you read one of my blog posts and sent me a message saying I had a typo.
I expect you'd have to read a lot of posts to find one. But maybe I'm wrong. (?)
I don't use a sibling or wife as proof readers except for things like resumes or the rare important letters/emails about touchy subjects. But I wouldn't consider them seeing this as an "unpaid job" in which I am unfairly subjugating them unless this were to occur very frequently.
I do however proof read my own work with my own eyes before I publish.
It's quite possible that if I were to write in Spanish (my second best language), I'd have a similar error rate as tante
@Impertinenzija @tante But I'm also very much less proficient in Spanish, and almost certainly would be double checking everything with a translation tool. (Likely google translate, because that's the easy path.)
I'd love to get to the point where I thought I could do without google translate checking my work in a foreign language.
But to get there I would want to have years of feedback and a vanishingly diminishing error rate in the feedback results.
But writers must set their own bar!