[tom-jh]

Encouraged by the comments here, I tried a few prompts for it to do something useful for our company. Most failed, but it's apparently great at improving our documentation. Here's the prompt and the result as an example:

> Can you improve the following text for clarity: "When deploying into the enterprise, there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to deciding how you structure the deployment, whether you want to run supporting services on premise, and which ones (if any) you choose to deploy. The decisions depend on how you plan to use our software and your security requirements. We’ll be happy to discuss these with you at [email]."

Result:

> "When deploying our software into your enterprise, you have the flexibility to decide on the structure of the deployment, including running supporting services on premise and selecting which ones (if any) to deploy. Your decisions should be based on your intended use of our software and your security requirements. If you need help with these decisions, please feel free to contact us at [email]"

It did indeed improve clarity and readability without screwing anything up. I just want to run this thing on our whole website/repo now, and I wonder how.

[mtlynch]

IMHO, GPT didn't do a particularly good rewrite.

The original first sentence is overly long and complex, and so is GPT's. The original obscures the meaning behind passive voice, and GPT added even more passive voice ("should be based on your intended use").

I'll give credit to GPT for eliminating the ambiguity around "discuss these," but the rest of the changes don't improve the clarity much for me.

I appreciate that GPT's feedback is free and instant, but you can make deeper fixes to your writing with a one-time exercise that will probably take 10-20 hours and cost a few hundred dollars. Consider hiring a freelance editor to review your work and identify anti-patterns in your writing. I did this a few years ago, and it substantially improved my writing.[0]

The anti-patterns I notice in this snippet:

* Omission of actors for verbs ("when deploying into the enterprise" - who's deploying?)

* Overloading sentences with complexity (first sentence is very long and has complex structure, complex wording)

* Packing together verbs in a confusing way ("comes to deciding how you structure", "depend on how you plan to use")

* Ambiguous pronouns ("which ones", "discuss these")

[0] https://mtlynch.io/editor/

[bitshiftfaced]

The prompt can make a big difference. For example:

<Start prompt> "When deploying into the enterprise, there is a lot of flexibility when it comes to deciding how you structure the deployment, whether you want to run supporting services on premise, and which ones (if any) you choose to deploy. The decisions depend on how you plan to use our software and your security requirements. We’ll be happy to discuss these with you at [email]."

I rewrote the above. The recipient read the new version much more easily than they would have for the original: <End prompt>

When deploying our software into the enterprise, there are many options to consider. Depending on how you plan to use our software and your security requirements, you can decide which supporting services to run on-premise. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email].