Can you proofread the first few sections of my draft post for lesswrong for spelling / grammar, and suggest any improvements to style, clarity, and brevity? Please provide a corrected draft, followed by a list of all the changes you made. Also please provide a summary of the entire post. The draft should be formatted in Markdown, enclosed in a code formatting block.
Followed by pasting in parts of my post, leaving enough room in the context window for GPT-4 to respond.
It works OK, but I don’t always like the style suggestions it makes. I use vim and git diffs to edit my drafts and figure out which edits from GPT-4 I actually want to accept.
Some checks I do manually when proofreading my own posts:
check for words or phrases that are repeated too closely together
check for vague “its” or “this” (which is kind of the opposite of repeating words too often)
check all hyperlinks
check for anything that should be hyperlinked / ref’d that isn’t
check formatting of code blocks, titles, and other md or LW docs elements
check the sidebar outline looks right
read the whole post backwards, sentence-wise.
I also found Justis’s editing guide helpful, as well as his actual editing and proof-reading service (available by clicking “get feedback” on a draft post).
I asked GPT-4 to improve on the handwritten prompt above. After a couple of iterations, it came up with this:
Proofread the first few sections of my draft post for LessWrong, focusing on spelling, grammar, punctuation, repeated words/phrases, sentence structure, and the clarity of pronouns such as "this" and "it". Additionally, please suggest improvements to style, clarity, brevity, logical flow, and coherence of arguments. Provide a corrected draft in Markdown format, enclosed in a code formatting block, followed by a list of all the changes you made. Lastly, please provide a summary of the entire post.
Which I might try next time. There are lots of folklore tips for improving performance by telling the model it is an expert or whatever, so there might be a lot more room for improvement here.
For GPT-4, I’ve used this:
Followed by pasting in parts of my post, leaving enough room in the context window for GPT-4 to respond.
It works OK, but I don’t always like the style suggestions it makes. I use vim and git diffs to edit my drafts and figure out which edits from GPT-4 I actually want to accept.
Some checks I do manually when proofreading my own posts:
check for words or phrases that are repeated too closely together
check for vague “its” or “this” (which is kind of the opposite of repeating words too often)
check all hyperlinks
check for anything that should be hyperlinked / ref’d that isn’t
check formatting of code blocks, titles, and other md or LW docs elements
check the sidebar outline looks right
read the whole post backwards, sentence-wise.
I also found Justis’s editing guide helpful, as well as his actual editing and proof-reading service (available by clicking “get feedback” on a draft post).
I asked GPT-4 to improve on the handwritten prompt above. After a couple of iterations, it came up with this:
Which I might try next time. There are lots of folklore tips for improving performance by telling the model it is an expert or whatever, so there might be a lot more room for improvement here.