@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

WordsByWesInk

@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social

Academic, technical, and nonfiction editing, specializing in CS, ML, AI, economics, and finance.

#AmEditing #Editing #Writing #TeXLaTeX #LaTeX #fedi22 searchable

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grammargirl, to ai
@grammargirl@zirk.us avatar

Draftsmith just released the results of a survey of ~500 language professionals on .

"The number of people who have little or no use for AI vastly outweigh the early adopters. Fear and cynicism outweigh the optimists."

"AI may be good for bringing low levels of language skill up to mediocre. But beating professionals at their own superpower is far harder."

Those were a couple of lines that jumped out at me. Find more at https://draftsmith.ai/blog/the-complex-truth-about-ai-and-language-professionals

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@grammargirl Thanks for sharing that. I took the survey and just read the post. Their headline quote of "fear and cynicism outweigh the optimists" doesn't seem supported by the graphs they show. The answers don't reflect cynicism to me, but rather a choice as to what tools are appropriate and useful for professional work.

WordsByWesInk, to edibuddies
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

This month’s Notes on Editing newsletter just went out with a trick for putting footnotes in Word’s text boxes, a note on upcoming changes to AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style, and an update on new additions to my LaTeX course.

If you’re interested, check it out and maybe sign up for future issues: https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/notesonediting/notes-on-editing-13/

@edibuddies

RedPenRabbit, to movies
@RedPenRabbit@writing.exchange avatar

I think typos and other errors have been told to travel in pairs so it's more likely that one will sneak through while the other is attracting all the attention. Clever little things.

@edibuddies

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@RedPenRabbit @edibuddies

Commas, on the other hand, often wander off on their own and have to be reunited with their partner.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I miss the Chrome look and feel from before the redesign this winter

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@mcc
I seem to be caught in the middle of an A/B test with that button. Each time Chrome updates on my desktop, the tab search button moves to the other side. It's a Google plot to ruin my productivity.

WordsByWesInk, to random
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

As usual for the new year, I’m getting requests to edit dissertations that have final submission deadlines of ... now. That rarely works well. Editors can only handle so many last-minute manuscripts, and that number is often zero.

So, this seems like a good time to mention: if you’re working on a dissertation or JMP due even at the end of this term and you want it professionally edited, it is not to early to start talking to editors.


1/7

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

You don’t have to wait until you’re done writing.

It may take a little bit to find someone who is both good fit and available when you need them, and the earlier you can get a reservation on their calendar, the better.

How do you find an editor? Referrals are good: talk with your advisor, other professors, your coauthors, or other students who’ve had their work edited to see who they’ve used and liked.
2/7

WordsByWesInk, to edibuddies
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

From now till the end of the year, my course LaTeX for Academic Editing is 15% off with coupon EOY2023.

If you’re an academic editor or author interested in working with LaTeX or learning more about it, check it out the current and planned curriculum here: https://www.wordsbywes.ink/courses/latex-for-academic-editors/

@edibuddies

WordsByWesInk, to edibuddies
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

A recent paper attributes ChatGPT’s launch with a 2% drop in monthly contracts and 5.2% drop in monthly income for writing-related freelancers on Upwork. There’s certainly been an impact, but I’m not convinced by these numbers.

I’ll touch on why below, and there’s more detail on my blog: https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/freelancing/notes-on-the-short-term-effects-of-generative-artificial-intelligence-on-employment-evidence-from-an-online-labor-market/

@edibuddies
1/5

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

Most importantly, monthly change in income is near impossible to calculate from Upwork’s public data. The authors aggregate a contract’s income into its starting month. That can bias month over month earnings change for long contracts, which may be paid over many months.
2/5

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

The sampling appears to be strongly skewed toward freelancers who haven’t gotten established on the platform: very low average and P95 monthly earnings and number of jobs started. That likely matches Upwork’s distribution; it’s very hard to get started there and many give up after a few (if any) contracts. But it means the study doesn’t say much about successful full-time freelancers.
3/5

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

And there are some possibly confounding events that intersect the study period; notably, rising job application costs and a large increase in scams targeting the writing category has caused friction for people trying to get established on the platform (which, again, is where the sample seems to skew).
4/5

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

So, while the paper shows ChatGPT has had an impact on the freelance market, it’s not clear how big that impact is, especially for established freelancers.

The paper is here: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4527336

And my notes are here: https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/freelancing/notes-on-the-short-term-effects-of-generative-artificial-intelligence-on-employment-evidence-from-an-online-labor-market/
5/5

Private
WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@tschfflr @linguistics Since it's in narrative, almost certainly option a. It ultimately depends on the style the journal uses, but I can't think of a style that uses option b in narrative.

kissane, to random
@kissane@mas.to avatar

If you want to destroy your brain with frothy SV technocapitalist rhetoric as well as the news this week, this would be a fantastic starting point. I’ve been staring at it for awhile and I’m just going to have to come back to it later.

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@kissane Readwise tells me I’m halfway through this, and it’s too late for coffee.

I edit a lot of AI papers, and I change Artificial Intelligence to lowercase in many of them. The authors almost always capitalize it because they think terms should be before introducing an acronym (no) or think keywords should be capitalized (generally no) or fields of study should be (ditto).

I’m not sure I’ve seen it capitalized as a term of divinity before.

albertcardona, to science
@albertcardona@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Not sure what those who advocate for the use of ChatGPT in scientific writing have in mind. It is the very act of writing that helps us think about the connections and implications of our results, identify gaps, and devise further experiments and controls.

Any science project that can be written up by a bot from tables of results and associated literature isn’t the kind of science that I’d want to do to begin with.

Can’t imagine completing a manuscript not knowing what comes next, because the writing was done automatically instead of me putting extensive thought into it.

And why would anyone bother to read it if the authors couldn’t be bothered to write it. Might as well put up the tables and figures into an archive online, stamp a DOI on it, and move on.

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@albertcardona @bahome Too often though it does change meaning — sometimes subtly — by substituting not-quite-synonyms and changing weaker but appropriate claims into stronger but false ones. I saw that in the datasets for the AI-detector bias paper (arXiv:2304.02819) and in my own informal tests. It seems to me that fluency requires understanding meaning, which LLMs can't do.

maxkennerly, to random
@maxkennerly@mstdn.social avatar

Happy to be corrected by an expert, but seems clear to me that every "AI detector" for text / image / video / audio is a complete scam and they should never be used in any context.

https://www.404media.co/ai-images-detectors-are-being-used-to-discredit-the-real-horrors-of-war/

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@maxkennerly
You're right. They are unreliable at best, and I haven't yet seen any path to making them reliable (including watermarks).

grammargirl, to random
@grammargirl@zirk.us avatar

An obviously minor complaint, but does my Oxford English Dictionary account really need to be more secure than my bank?

I have to log in fresh every time I go there, even if it's just an hour later than when I was there before.

Also, did you know there are 8 different British pronunciations of "orangutan"?

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@grammargirl I mailed them about this a couple of months ago (the login timeout, not the orangutans) and was told they were "looking into a change that would lessen the amount of times that users are asked to log in during sessions", but they did not have an ETA.

Maybe if we promise to lock our office doors to keep the word thieves out.

WordsByWesInk, to FantasyWriters
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

New post: Tools I Use: Zotero
This is the first in a series of posts where I’ll talk about the tools I use in my editing and writing. In this piece, I’m going to talk about citation management, specifically with Zotero.

I’ve used a few other citation managers, but Zotero is my go-to. I use it to store and keep track of my own reading pile, to keep the list of manuscripts I’ve worked on, and to manage refs for clients’ manuscripts.
https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/tools/tools-i-use-zotero

@edibuddies

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

While I've happily used Scrivener to write books for nearly 15 years now, I suspect I'm going to eventually have to switch to writing Markdown files using some flavour of vi (currently neovim with plugins that provide syntax colourization and folding for Markdown files) and pandoc for final export. Unless Scriv's UI is stable version 4 will probably be a nope.

(I used to use vim and the Perl POD toolchain for books, before Scriv. But publishers demand Word docs for change tracking.)

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@cstross
Just in case you haven't seen this: there's a 3rd party Word plugin called Writage that imports and exports standard Markdown. It works reasonably well, though I haven't used it on anything novel-sized. And it's cheap at around US$30.

alex, to random

Editing a Google Doc with track changes on the iPad is trash. I went back to using the browser. Is this the best strategy, or do y'all power users have a better option?

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@alex
The web experience with tracked changes is horrible, but it's infinitely better than the apps. My "better option" is using Word, but that's not always feasible with shared docs or if the keeping the formatting intact is important.

WordsByWesInk, to LLMs
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

New post: LLM-Generated Text Still Can’t Be Copyrighted
A federal judge ruled Friday that AI-generated art is not eligible for copyright. Here, I cover that ruling and speculate on how copyright protection for AI-generated work might eventually play out.
https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/tools/llm-generated-text-still-cant-be-copyrighted

@edibuddies

grammargirl, to random
@grammargirl@zirk.us avatar

If you're a freelancer or get paid on contract, which do you prefer? Being paid less quickly, or being paid more but painfully slowly?

I know it depends on how much more or less, but I'm curious. Do you even consider it with clients?

There's definitely a threshold over which I will grudgingly wait longer for payment, but it affects my enthusiasm. I think if I were choosing between two competing projects, I'd take the one that pays faster.

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@grammargirl
I don't mind net30, and I luckily haven't had anyone ask for more than that yet, though I've worked with a university who seemed to think that net30 meant sending the paperwork to AP on day 30 to cut a check. More than net30 I think would make me balk.

I've heard of universities offering faster payment for a discount, and I'm not at all interested in that.

troublewithwords, to random
@troublewithwords@wandering.shop avatar

Not calling out anyone here, just heard it used in a lecture:

Penultimate does not mean "extra ultimate." It means one less than ultimate.

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@troublewithwords
What does "extra ultimate" even mean? Is it like a twofer on the best product?

pc_bain, to FantasyWriters
@pc_bain@toot.wales avatar

Looking for editorial professionals on Mastodon?

For editors, see and @edibuddies @stetwalk.

For proofreaders, see .

For book indexers, see and .

Editors, indexers, proofreaders (ACES/CIEP/EFA/SI etc.), please say hello below. Then I’ll keep this toot pinned to help find each other. 🤓

WordsByWesInk,
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

@pc_bain @edibuddies @stetwalk
Hi Paula, thanks for posting this. I mainly do academic and technical editing, focusing on computer science, AI, ML, economics, finance, and related fields.

I also have a course on LaTeX for other academic editors.

WordsByWesInk, to edibuddies
@WordsByWesInk@mstdn.social avatar

New post: LaTeX Troubleshooting Tip: “Not in outer par mode”
A client came to me with a LaTeX puzzle. What were all of these "Not in outer par mode" errors?
https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/tools/latex-troubleshooting-tip-not-in-outer-par-mode

@edibuddies

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