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cybernetics

Effective Writing with Language Models

This is not about asking a model to generate ideas for you. It is about placing your own thinking into a responsive medium so it can be worked. You bring partial arguments, intuitions, constraints, and unresolved tensions. The model reflects them back through selective amplification: adjacent phrasings, shifts in emphasis, alternative structures. That amplification makes the idea legible without deciding it. You then intervene—cutting, redirecting, compressing, refusing—until the thought clarifies. The model accelerates iteration. It does not supply authorship, intent, or judgment.

What governs acceptance and rejection is the author’s attention. Years of reading, writing, and adaptation provide the constraints, but they only matter if you actively exercise them. You do not produce a draft and stop. You reread, question what you were trying to say, and force unclear moves to declare themselves. Do not let the system smuggle in tidy aphorisms or vague cleverness that feels right but explains nothing. Ask it to spell things out. Where something sounds sharp to you, assume it may be opaque to others. Sometimes that is bias, sometimes insight. The work is staying with the uncertainty long enough to tell the difference.

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