I think a lot of ESL speakers are too hard on themselves. I have often seen people apologize online and in person and I didn’t think they had anything to apologize for, they wrote/sounded fine.
The only thing I’d say about this post is to maybe break it into some paragraphs so it doesn’t feel like a wall of text.
Good writing is rewriting. That said, in my experience the hardest part is writing the first draft, i.e., just getting something down at all. So do whatever you need to do to get your own thoughts on the page (except Claude, obviously), and then proofread, correct, and revise. If you do substantial revisions, then you'll have to do more editing passes. When you do a pass and only make minor changes, that's a sign that you're probably done.
If you think you're just a poor writer...well, you won't get better without doing it a lot, will you? Also consider that AI assistance will actively hamper your growth, and that's considered a feature, not a bug (would the AI labs prefer you to depend on their products, or to outgrow them?).
On spelling and grammar, you can't get flagged as AI for using spellcheck. I don't use grammar checking, but I read somewhere that grammar checking algorithms have gotten good now, so that could be something else to look into (as long as it just highlights potential problems and doesn't rewrite your words).
When asking AI to improve the text, I ask it for feedback. It might come with suggestions for changed sentences, but I then try to capture the essence of the suggestion while rewriting the sentence myself. Perhaps what the AI wanted was to add a caveat, or use a more careful phrasing.
I then respond with my rewrite and ask for feedback again.
At least this lets me keep the writing mine, while avoiding blatant errors.
That said, I don't do this often, never when replying on forums like this, only when say writing documentation or similar. English is my second language but people will just have to deal with it for the most part.
I think a lot of ESL speakers are too hard on themselves. I have often seen people apologize online and in person and I didn’t think they had anything to apologize for, they wrote/sounded fine.
The only thing I’d say about this post is to maybe break it into some paragraphs so it doesn’t feel like a wall of text.
Good writing is rewriting. That said, in my experience the hardest part is writing the first draft, i.e., just getting something down at all. So do whatever you need to do to get your own thoughts on the page (except Claude, obviously), and then proofread, correct, and revise. If you do substantial revisions, then you'll have to do more editing passes. When you do a pass and only make minor changes, that's a sign that you're probably done.
If you think you're just a poor writer...well, you won't get better without doing it a lot, will you? Also consider that AI assistance will actively hamper your growth, and that's considered a feature, not a bug (would the AI labs prefer you to depend on their products, or to outgrow them?).
On spelling and grammar, you can't get flagged as AI for using spellcheck. I don't use grammar checking, but I read somewhere that grammar checking algorithms have gotten good now, so that could be something else to look into (as long as it just highlights potential problems and doesn't rewrite your words).
I dont understand. Who is flagging and more importantly, why does it even matter?
I think you will find that a technical audience is much more tolerant of imperfect English than you seem to expect.
Side note. yes, in the past, totally had AI write stuff. Because I'm lazy and it's easy, I've stopped.
Ah, the royal road to learning how to write.
When asking AI to improve the text, I ask it for feedback. It might come with suggestions for changed sentences, but I then try to capture the essence of the suggestion while rewriting the sentence myself. Perhaps what the AI wanted was to add a caveat, or use a more careful phrasing.
I then respond with my rewrite and ask for feedback again.
At least this lets me keep the writing mine, while avoiding blatant errors.
That said, I don't do this often, never when replying on forums like this, only when say writing documentation or similar. English is my second language but people will just have to deal with it for the most part.
What's the question?