Awash in Text
I believe the printing press is one of the best inventions ever made, possibly _the_ best, tho indoor plumbing is up there. Since the advent of ChatGPT, however, I’ve heard several people explain that ChatGPT is awesome, in part, because it allows humans to effortlessly generate “boilerplate” copy. Although I am enthusiastic about AI, I consider that a weakness.
When I was a teenager, my bff got another friend who played guitar with him. His friend told him songs are like boards, and each change is like another nail. If you put a bunch of nails into a board, it gets weak. I actually don’t agree with the metaphor (and I think the entire post-hardcore genre would agree with me), but when it comes to writing, I strongly believe in concision. Indeed, I think a lot about how we can transition written language to a chord-like structure, because the current approach is extremely inefficient.
Anyway, before I forget my point, I want to encourage folks to stop using filler words. Not all modifiers, mind you, as we want to be able to effectively describe nouns and verbs. But the notion that using words is inherently good is, from my perspective, foolish. I’m not sure what the original sin was, but I definitely remember minimum word counts and/or page counts from school, and I think both are extremely misguided. Really, the teachers want the students to satisfy another requirement, such as time spent. But because they lack a way of measuring that, they use word count as a proxy. I’m not sure of a superior alternative, but I can see negative side effects of the prevailing approach all around me.
Do I have a point? I dunno, use fewer filler words, I guess.