Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI.
It might be that with precision, readability is lost. It's a tradeoff: the more compressed your language is, and hence the more precise, the more cognitive effort you require the reader to expend on each word. Reading is a translation from your mental model, as expressed in words, to the readers mental model. Words alone don't perform this translation, the act of reading and interpreting does so. With your concision you give no help to the reader in this process.
One suspicion I have is that your one-pager was passed through AI because it was too terse to serve the job of aiding the general reader in obtaining an understanding of the topic for themselves.
Writing to be read by an audience is a vastly different activity than writing notes that merely, precisely, document for the maximally informed highest-context reader (or one willing to do the work of reassembling this context during reading).
When you're writing for others, especially a "generic other", you're expected to adopt their uninformed, low-context, high-difficulty reading position, and fill-out the prose in an aid to their understanding.
This will involve: repetition (restatement with different words and ideas), illustration with simple examples, grounding in examples most likely to be familiar to them, explicit statement of steps/procedures/processes that breakdown topics/actions into small units which are each easy to immediately understand, possibly: some humor to break the effort of reading, some asides which engage or interest the reader, some context which makes the reading reelvant to them so they will be willing to expend the effort to read it.
This is an insane response to someone having their carefully written work casually bastardized by an LLM that rewrote the entire design spec without even being informed. The amount of institutional noise generated by such carelessness far exceeds whatever improvement in readability you could possibly imagine. Any criticism you could aim at the original text that you don't even have on hand (i.e. are completely speculating wrt its readability) you could direct 100x over at the manager's horrible communication skills.
You're assuming malign motivations, I'm assuming misplaced ones. It seems more likely to me the manager tried to read it and struggled, then generated something of equivalent size or larger. I'm taking it the generated document passed around was actually at least as large as the one-pager, and hence entirely pointless to rephrase even with the malign motivations you're assuming.
Since the poster here wears his personality and writing motivations on his sleeve, it is very obvious to me that he writes at cross purposes with those who read. he says very clearly: he writes for precision, expended a vast cognitive effort per word.
Even if, in this instance, my analysis is wrong -- its a comment for the poster here worth considering. Because people don't like to read writing which has taken such effort to produce, because it then requires a great effort to read.
> It seems more likely to me the manager tried to read it and struggled, then generated something of equivalent size or larger.
Either way, it's poor management to interpose oneself between employees. As a manager you should be connecting groups of people to talk to each other directly, not injecting oneself as a go between. If they have issues understanding the material they're much better off asking the OP directly than asking the manager who doesn't understand it either. And they'll be in a much better place to do that if they have read the material OP actually wrote.
> You're assuming malign motivations, I'm assuming misplaced ones.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
And sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I'm not seeing the point.
When I read documentation, I'm not there to enjoy the experience. I'm there to find out how the documented thing works and how to use it. It's not a novel. I'm not there for entertainment.
Chasing readability without maintaining accuracy is a failure in the context of documentation no matter the motivations involved.
I'm not saying that readability can't be a consideration when making documentation. I am saying that if you discard accuracy in the process, you've fucked up quite badly.
This anecdote would likely be very different if the AI-modified version had been passed back to engineering for a review before sending it out.
If you remove AI from the conversation, it still sounds like he needs an editor.
This is such a good summary of effective communication practices. It was the same sort of thought process that I went through when writing technical documentation and presentations, and it served me very well.
No. Someone replaced well thought out documentation with AI fabrications and let GP take the fall for it.
That is malicious and inexcusable. It's not on GP, the fault lies with the idiot that ran gold documentation through the bullshit machine. Don't blame someone who was wronged, that makes you a malicious asshole.
I can still see a path where the manager was stupid but not malicious. The manager sent on a document which he was too lazy to check at least had the right endpoints but left the GP's contact details on. I could also imagine intentional harm to GP's reputation was the goal, with really clumsy execution.
>Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI.
Note that the manager may or may not have incentive at all to provide useful or even meaningful feedback.
I mean, he did pass on an incorrect version of the documentation, didn't he?
hi! yes. perhaps he wil write inchoate sentence like point out which word is wrong
>One suspicion I have is that your one-pager was passed through AI because it was too terse to serve the job of aiding the general reader in obtaining an understanding of the topic for themselves.
"Too terse" beats "factually wrong" any day. Anyone who claims otherwise is evil.
>Writing to be read by an audience is a vastly different activity than writing notes that merely, precisely, document for the maximally informed highest-context reader (or one willing to do the work of reassembling this context during reading).
Now do "writing to be read by an unwilling audience", and "writing to be read by an audience that controls the feeder and shockprod".
On your last sentence:
The very first sentences should clear warnings not to modify the document, and read it entirely. That the contents of the document are short (<5min of reading) and extremely important. That a lot of effort has gone into making the document short, to the point, and easy to read/use.
And if that still doesnt work, arrange a 15min meeting with relevant stakeholders and go through the document quickly before releasing it.
It is my view that we have always been an oral species, and the great tyranny of the written words always a great burden, and any writing of any complexity or technical depth, out of reach for all but an elite.
Speaking to people in a meeting allows them to emote, express difficulty of understanding, understand the sentiment and priority of what they're hearing -- and most of all, it allows them to listen rather than read. People speak at a much lower information density, and this is a less taxing form of communication.
Writing has always been a great burden. It should not be elevated to, nor equivocated with, some great utility or intellectual practice. That was for an era where sound was harder to record and transmit than words; and where meetings required moving around the world.
A kind of writing which makes reading even harder is an even worse pathology. This isnt writing for a species of ape, but some one deranged enough to expend cognitive effort in such inhuman ways.