However, I'm concerned by how few people replying understand this suggestion. Publications are time-intensive for people to write.
The marketing blurb for a book? The average person reads it within seconds. Writing an appropriately appealing one takes hours.
A news article? Minutes to read. Hours to write.
An ESL reader won't take longer to go through a short story than the author did unless the reader is looking up most of the words in a dictionary or another reference. Even then, it's iffy. That's assuming the author wasn't building an original world, uncommon character, or new technique for days or weeks beforehand.
A line of alt text for an online image generally requires thought and a few tries to be well written. Screen readers don't see that effort.
The difference in time requirements for anything more serious than a casual chat text is huge. (As for casual chat... what good are the words of a digital robot?)
That's partly why algorithm-generated writing is so dangerous to publishers. It pushes out human writers who can't or who refuse out of artistic/journalistic integrity to keep up with unrealistic demands.
Expecting a publication to be written inhumanly fast is beyond rude. That dehumanizing of writers is destroying authors' will to publish anything of importance.
@simon anything you write, will always take longer to read by someone with English as a second language.
With regards to text the only question to ask is if the thing you're asking others to read is worth time and effort to consume. To help others make that decision before reading i put an "average reading time" calculation at the top of each post. That's for average English reader but ESL people can extrapolate from that.
@masukomi@simon If the recipient is or might be reading it as a second language, you have even more obligation to be terse and clear and not hide your points among meaningless bullshit.
@masukomi ESL is such an interesting use-case for this stuff - I would hope that even the most ardent LLM skeptic would appreciate the enormous difference this kind of tech can make there
@simon Nah, because they’ll just put it through their own AI to summarize it. That’s what AI actually solves: you give your AI an sloppy list of points you want to say, it wraps it up in a socially acceptable paragraph form, then that gets unwrapped back into an easily digestible list by an AI on the other end. “Paragraphs” just become a protocol format to prove you can afford an AI.
@simon A bit similar as how I feel about the "developer centric" (DX over UX) mindset in our industry: It's rude if you trade gains in developer convenience with increased resource usage on the client side.
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