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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Editing Advice for EA Forum Users, published by Justis on April 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Ok, I fibbed. This is a crosspost of Editing Advice for LessWrong Users, but I suspect there is a decent amount of overlap between the sorts of editing advice most useful for these two forums. Who am I? I'm an editor who does feedback requests for LessWrong. Many of these feedback requests are for proofreading/clarity of language, so I have lots of experience reading community draft posts and helping improve them. I want to share some high level takeaways - low effort self-editing techniques that, based on my[1] experience, I think many to most LW posters could benefit from. Disclaimers I wrote all the example text in this post myself. I make no claims that any of it is reasonable on the object level - it's just meant to resemble lots of the stuff I edit. Bolded text in examples is for emphasis of the points under discussion, not a sign that it would make sense to actually bold those words or phrases. As usual, reverse advice as necessary. What's the advice? Here's my main advice, in decreasing order of confidence - I'll elaborate on each: Beware "this" Don't let hedging be a tic Break up run-on sentences Use more links, images, examples, and commas Beware "this" The problem: many sentences on LessWrong begin with "this". At worst, the thing "this" is pointing to is fully ambiguous between multiple live options, making it impossible to parse the author's intended meaning. But even in milder cases, it can waste a few seconds for the reader to trace out what a post is talking about. The solution: scan through your draft for words like "this" or "that" (but for whatever reason overwhelmingly "this" specifically), and when in doubt about clarity, just replace them with whatever their intended antecedents are. An example: Many key figures in the community have been shortening their timelines recently, since major advances just keep coming one after the other. This is especially worrying, especially compared to discussions of "AI winter" just a few years ago. What, precisely, does "this" point to in the sentence above? The fact of key figures shortening their timelines? The major advances? When we get later in the sentence and see that we're comparing whatever "this" is to "discussions", we can infer that we're talking about the shortening of timelines (vs. the actual technical advances), but it takes up precious reader bandwidth to figure this out, or, worse, the reader becomes overloaded by ambiguity and unconsciously switches to "skimming mode". Individually, overuse of "this" isn't a big deal. But it adds up. It's the single greatest contribution to a hand-wavy feeling in the posts I review, like maybe the author isn't totally sure what they're saying. And it's easy to avoid! Just ctrl-f "this" and go to town! Don't let hedging be a tic The problem: LessWrongers care a lot about making factually accurate claims. This (gasp!) is a virtue. But like any virtue, it's vulnerable to Goodharting: when people learn that hedging is a sign of epistemic responsibility, you end up with a whole lot of hedging. Occasionally, you actually end up with hedging that is logically incoherent or actively redundant. The solution: Make sure you hedge precisely as much as necessary, and especially make sure you don't hedge the same claim multiple times in the same way. If "you suspect" something "might" happen, it doesn't also have to be "possible" that it "could" have "potentially" significant effects. An example: The other salient quality of insect suffering is its sheer scale. Insects are the most populous animals on the planet, so it may be that if their suffering is morally relevant at all, I believe it could swamp almost any other considerations about animal welfare. Some hedging is...