On defensive writing

I love writing. It’s one of the reasons why I chose to become a researcher in the first place. That there’s a profession where you get to read interesting articles, invent new things, and write about these seemed unreal. But now that we’re in the era of Large Language Models, social media seems abound with instances of LLM-generated influencer posts. I too find myself frequently wondering if something I wrote a second ago sounds robotic enough to trigger alarms. I’ve convinced myself to not use listicles, for instance, for the sake of avoiding a call out even when it was the most appropriate thing for the task. Punctuation is another. Everyone’s favourite em-dash is now definitely a no-go. Colons and semi-colons? Probably not. Want to elucidate? Nope, not anymore. I should point out I’ve been guilty of using all these pre-LLM btw, being an Indian kid who diligently prepped for his GREs a lifetime ago.

Medical professionals in western countries get sued all the time, which I guess is the extreme form of social media policing. To battle this onslaught, the profession came up with the practice of prescribing any and all treatments and tests to patients, just to avoid getting sued by the patient or their relatives. This is widely known in the industry as “Defensive Medicine”.

I think it’s apt to define what I’m doing as “defensive writing”. To provide a more concrete definition -

Defensive writing: The art of shaping your writing to pass as human, even at the risk of muting your own voice.

Ironically, here are some general rules to go by when practicing the art of defensive writing in the form of a list.

1. Obviously, avoid em-dashes and over-punctuating in general.
2. Prioritize sentence length and word choice variety. Robots like uniformity.
3. Put a bit of your personality into it. Humor, empathy etc, is definitely human. Neutrality is robotic.
4. Use specific examples and sensory details.
5. Avoid tricolons, especially ascending ones.
6. Make original metaphors. LLMs make dull ones.
7. Common words are in, SAT words are out. You do not elucidate anymore, you just explain. And you never ever delve into anything, or use tapestry in a sentence.

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Now you can take things one step further and sprinkle in typos and mangled grammar, but I don’t think anyone enjoys reading shoddy essays. My point is also not that any of these are necessarily a terrible choice when writing. It’s just that perceptions change, and so it might be better to adapt to the times.

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