A style guide for making Claude-like models write normally, and its linguistic traps
gleech · x · 2026-10-13
A detailed gist-style guide for getting Claude and Claude-likes to write normally: docs must be descriptive, process-oriented first-person narrations of operations on data — never declarative contracts between data structures. The author warns about counterintuitive but crucial "Chesterton's fences": innocuous words like "wire" become verbal basins of attraction if allowed even once, so they must be banned from the start. He also tried cooperative steering instead of scolding. A linguist shares it as applied linguistics research linguists should be doing.
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