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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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I (non-native English speaker) found ChatGPT's critique helpful with a recent application letter. I will grant you that it was a bit more formal than your choice of text, though -- I did not talk about drinking anyone's bathwater, time will tell if that was the correct choice or not.

Most of its suggestions were minor stylistic things (using a gerund instead of an infinitive in certain phrases, avoiding repetition of word constructs) which seemed to me to be improvements.

I will grant you that an application letter is probably a more central example of most of its training data than that perv diary entry -- it is a continuous text, for one thing. Also, unlike that diary entry, I did not start out with a (presumably well-formulated) draft in a foreign language which I translated to English and then asked GPT to correct my English without access to the original (which from what I can tell is what happened with the diary). Instead, I wrote me thoughts down in English, sometimes awkwardly, and relied on it to put them into a smoother form.

Most of its suggestions were minor stylistic things (using a gerund instead of an infinitive in certain phrases, avoiding repetition of word constructs) which seemed to me to be improvements.

I guess I haven't seen the letter itself, but I think this is solidly covered by my point: By critiquing things that aren’t wrong, learners who follow blindly will lose their voice.

The final edited work may or may not be "objectively better" but it will certainly be more "chatgpt-ish."

I think that ChatGPT will suggest edits which will make a draft by a non-native speaker sound both more smooth and more ChatGPTish, in pretty much the same way as an American/British editor will suggest edits that will make the text sound more natural but also more American/British English.

Of course, if I were to prompt "please restate the content in the following paragraph in your own words", then I would get something which sounds a lot like ChatGPT.

While my active English is a bit limited, I think my passive English is rather good. I have read a lot of stuff written by native speakers and trust myself to generally pick between two proposed phrasings.

For what it is worth, ChatGPT did not try to introduce a single em dash for me. I took most of its stylistic suggestions (often along the lines of "use gerund here" or "you just used that phrase two sentences ago" or "oops, you forgot to finish this sentence") and rejected most suggestions around tone appropriateness.