The day before yesterday I stayed up until almost 1 in the morning and freaking finally got that essay out. I looked at my notes, started speaking and writing and 40 minutes later I had a terribly transcribed draft out. I gave it to gemini ai, then modified it a bunch, and then edited for another 30 minutes the next day. It still needs some editing, but I'm confident it's going in the direction where I want it to go, generally speaking.
What are my opinions and how do I feel about it? This wasn't the first essay of its kind, but definitely the first that went beyond 1k words. It's massive, it encompasses so many points and angles. This is a serious essay. I enjoyed the pacing of it, I had no problems with narrating it, and it made me think. Originally editing was a bit of a hassle because what I narrated and the cleaned up transcript ai generated didn't align, but with both the versions sitting closer I was able to clean things faster. Plus adding an 'exoskeleton' to the final essay helped me organize it better, thanks to the ai which helped me summarize my points.
It looks like a really decent quality 2k ish words essay takes me 1.5 hours to produce. A bit longer possibly. That's a reasonable amount of time, specially if it involves moving things around, organizing it better and tightening the arguments. It doesn't scale down accordingly, of course, but there are gains to be made. I'm quite eager to keep doing this for a lot longer.
The goal is to draw up an outline, speak on the topic for 20-40 minutes, rewrite the cleaned up transcript, edit it, and then posting it. If I were good at that, and did it consistently, it wouldn't be insane to have something decent and interesting come out in an hour or so. It'd be a lot shorter, but that's what people like reading anyway. Zippy essays that you don't have to commit hours to.
I should do this more often, and divide the larger essay into a few parts, basically novelizing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Tell me what you think. I'll read, promise.