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Getting creative with embeddings

wattenberger.com · 736 words · saved by 1 readers

In defiance of the “AI will write everything for us” narrative, I’ve been noodling on a writing app, PenPal, focused on the opposite: making us better writers. My process has involved a lot of research into how great writing instructors work. There’s one concept I find especially appealing: making the implicit explicit. Much of the work of becoming a better writer doesn’t involve writing, but instead taking a magnifying glass to others’ writing. Can PenPal make it easy to see Hemingway’s style, to compare Stephen King to John Steinbeck, or even to compare your writing style to Roald Dahl’s? This actually isn’t a completely new idea for me. After seeing a popular example of the power of diverse sentence lengths, I create an app that highlights each sentence based on its length. This was an easy add! Just loop over every sentence and map the character count to a color scale. But I remembered an essay from Robin Sloan I had squirreled away in my notes a few years ago: Week 4, ladder of ab

Getting creative with embeddings In defiance of the “AI will write everything for us” narrative, I’ve been noodling on a writing app, PenPal, focused on the opposite: making us better writers. My process has involved a lot of research into how great writing instructors work. There’s one concept I find especially appealing: making the implicit explicit. Much of the work of becoming a better writer doesn’t involve writing, but instead taking a magnifying glass to others’ writing. Can PenPal make it easy to see Hemingway’s style, to compare Stephen King to John Steinbeck, or even to compare your

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