On Claude's Clotted Writing Style - Kieran Gill

I use Claude every day. And yet, I have not figured out how to read Claude's dialect.

This is a problem for me because Claude stuffs its prose into every cranny of a program. And without fail I try to read it.

example -->

What does it say? Not a lot. But a lot of space was used in the process.

I've had a hard time explaining Claude's writing style to others. It's stilted, but in a way that's draining to read.

I recently came across this quote from William Zinsser and now have something to share with my coworkers the next time I have an aneurysm.

But just because people work for an institution, they don't have to write like one. Institutions can be warmed up. Administrators can be turned into human beings. Information can be imparted clearly and without pomposity. You only have to remember that readers identify with people, not with abstractions like "profitability," or with Latinate nouns like "utilization" and "implementation," or with inert constructions in which nobody can be visualized doing something: "pre-feasibility studies are in the paperwork stage."

Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell's version goes:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

First notice how the two passages look. The first one at the top invites us to read it. The words are short and have air around them; they convey the rhythms of human speech. The second one is clotted with long words. It tells us instantly that a ponderous mind is at work. We don't want to go anywhere with a mind that expresses itself in such suffocating language. We don't even start to read.

Clotted Claude. Perfect.

In 2021, you were lazy if you didn't write comments. Today, you are lazy for the comments you leave in.

I have a lot of love for these tools, but I much prefer when we read code, not comments, and left the program more informed for it.