Teaching Claude to Write Like Zweig | rornicI recently finished reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday. It’s less a memoir than an elegy for an entire European culture, burned to the ground by two wars and fascism. He finished it in exile in Brazil, 1942, a long way from the Vienna he was mourning, one day before he and his wife took their own lives.<br>That’s a heavy place to find writing advice. A short, reflective passage on his process caught my attention regardless.<br>LinkedIn posts, blogs, code, PRs - mine included - are littered with AI-written text these days. Most of it is obvious: a sprinkle of em-dashes, sentences that don’t logic, something that just feels “off”. The worst is the three-beat rhythm that makes it read like a sales pitch.<br>Have you ever wondered why your cat always seems disgusted?<br>Here’s a clue — it’s not you.<br>It’s that abysmally grim cat food you feed it.<br>Zweig writes in long, winding sentences, with a dusting of introspection, detailed descriptions that form vivid pictures in your head, and personal takes that make you think. Fresh air compared to the factually dense history books I usually endure, and a level of engagement beyond anything LLM-generated that I’ve read or produced.<br>Good writing has two jobs that pull against each other: say it in as few words as possible, and keep the reader with you until the end. Brevity respects their time, but engagement spends it on literary devices: figures of speech, building tension, a little humour. The techniques that make writing interesting are the ones that make it longer.<br>LLMs are trained on everything: narratives, documentation, speeches, blogs, tweets and so on. No wonder most AI-generated writing gives my brain a power cut. It lacks a proper structure even though the substance is there, and fails to keep me reading until the end. And no, I’m not just allergic to em-dashes.<br>So how do we use LLMs to communicate in a way that strikes a balance between engaging enough to hook a reader and concise enough to respect their time?<br>Zweig’s writing holds part of the answer. The rest lies with our own voice.<br>The Zweigian Process#<br>An LLM lays track one token at a time, with no way to double back, but did Zweig really write The World of Yesterday word-by-word in a single pass? I think not.<br>He puts it best in his own words:<br>I have hardly finished writing the first rough draft of a book before I begin on what to me is the real work, condensing my material and finding the right way to put it. I go on working tirelessly like this from draft to draft. I am constantly throwing ballast overboard, intensifying and clarifying a book’s inner architecture. Most writers cannot bring themselves to leave anything out, and having fallen rather in love with their subject hope to display a greater breadth and depth of knowledge than they really possess in every well-turned line, whereas my own ambition is always to know more than shows on the outside.
Later, at the proof stages, I then repeat this process of intensifying and then enhancing the dramatic effect once, twice, or three times. In the end I find myself enjoying a kind of hunt for another sentence, or just a word, which can be cut without affecting my precise meaning and at the same time might speed up the tempo. I really get my greatest satisfaction in my work from leaving things out. I remember that once, when I rose from my desk feeling pleased with what I had done, my wife said I seemed to be in a cheerful mood today. “Yes,” I replied proudly, “I’ve managed to cut a whole paragraph and make the action move faster.” So if my books are sometimes praised for sweeping readers along at a swift pace, it does not come from any natural heated or agitated approach to the work of writing, but is entirely the result of my system of always cutting unnecessarily slack passages–anything at all that, like radio interference, might distract the reader’s attention. If I have mastered any kind of art, it is the art of leaving things out. I do not mind throwing eight hundred of a thousand written pages into the waste-paper basket, leaving me with only two hundred to convey what I have sifted out as the essence of the work. So if anything at least partly accounts for the success of my books, it is my strict discipline in preferring to confine myself to short works of literate, concentrating on the heart of the matter.
Zweig is a master of refinement. The first pass is merely the start, with each draft expressing more meaning more concisely and drawing the reader further in. Your LLM’s single forward pass is a potato to Zweig’s triple-distilled vodka.<br>What if we apply this refinement process to an excerpt that I unashamedly ripped from someone’s LinkedIn post?<br>Everyone is debating whether AI will replace software engineers.<br>I think that’s yesterday’s argument.<br>The engineers who...