One of my projects at the moment is writing a style guide for our LLM outputs. Rather than just letting the AI cannon out slop, we want to force it into producing something coherent, readable, useful, and ideally with a high level of clarity.
This is harder than you might think.
It had me thinking, what is my personal style guide? I don’t have one, either for speech or for writing. There are habits and patterns that I recognise in my writing; the liberal use of semi-colons is one of them. For verbal communication, I have even less of an idea. After all, how much are we really listening to ourselves talk?
With that said, I have noticed a linguistic trend occuring more regularly: the self-question. This is where you ask a question that you automatically answer. For example, I may be talking to my intern about the current issue(s) belaboring the company, and then say “why am I telling you all of this?”, before diving into my proposed solution. My CEO does this all the time, and I clearly like it enough to replicate it.
For my walk this afternoon, I’ll ponder whether it is even possible, or useful, to create a personal style-guide, or it is a purely organic mechanism. You may wish to inspire people with your language like Julius Caesar or Winston Churchill, but aping them wouldn’t be impressive; it would be farcical.
Something to ponder.
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