5th Grade Outlining in Mrs. L's Class : Metawriting before the Age of AI
Tomasz TunguzVenture Capitalist If you were forwarded this newsletter, and you'd like to receive it in the future, subscribe here. 5th Grade Outlining in Mrs. L's Class : Metawriting before the Age of AI
When I sat down to write this post, I wrote : Write an introductory paragraph telling a story about when I was in grade school, my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. L, insisted on the class outlining their paper. Write a paragraph about how we all wish we would outline, & there are frameworks like Situation, Complication, Question, & Answer that achieve this goal. But it’s been easier to simply dive in as much for grade school as in corporate life. Write a paragraph that today, with AI, writing has become easier because the outline is (i) essential to prompting AI to steer the narrative ; (ii) it’s easier to edit than it is to write ; (iii) incomplete thoughts can populate the outline & AI will interpolate to fit them in. Those are AI prompts. Within 45 seconds after drafting that outline, AI could have written a full post on the topic. In fact, it did & it’s here, a bit flowery & verbose, but on point. It’s no different in software. When I wrote analysis code two years ago, I typed every line. Today, my analysis code starts like this:
The computer fills in the code afterwards. Most of the time I execute the R script without changing code. In computer science, this is called metaprogramming. I suspect we’ll call the first section of the blog post metawriting. This type of meta-activity is the reason AI will massively increase our productivity. AI frees us to focus on the higher-order goal while the computer sweats the details. What hasn’t changed about writing since the dawn of AI? A good outline remains essential. Grammar teachers rejoice! |
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