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Brevity: Not In The Soul of Writing Algorithms

Algorithm definition

“Brevity is the soul of wit” according to William Shakespeare, a famous quote whose expression matches its content. The context for the line, however, comes from his play, Hamlet. In Act I, the king’s counselor, Polonius, embeds and embellishes the meaning of his statement within a lengthy and fulsome preamble whose style subtly undercuts the essence of his obseration.

Search Engine Optimization

One would think the many automated writing assistants available today strive to adhere to Shakespeare’s dictum, but such is not the case. Perhaps it’s the influence of the media or the constraints of writing a blog post which seeks to optimize reader discovery through online search engines (SEOs). Whatever the case, the algorithms driving the writing software which evaluate the quality of posts such as this one encourage neither brevity of expression nor sincerity of soul.

Take, for example, the content within this post’s headline. Nine words long, it started out with six, which met the optimum length requirements. Nonetheless, the SEO software scored it fifty out of one hundred points, a good first effort. Subsequent attempts bumped up the score ten points, good but well short of the 75 needed to merit a satisfactory rating. In playing off the Bard’s quote, “writer algorithms” became a replacement for “wit,” a lengthier, non-rhyming noun more appropriate to the post’s subject matter. Despite these improvements, the software rewarded my attempts with a score in the mid-60s; better but still short of the goal.

Style vs. Substance

Only when the nondescript preposition “in” was inserted between “brevity” and “the soul” in the headline did the writing software bless my efforts with success. The semantic difference between being the essence of something or operating as just another attribute of that something didn’t matter. The important point appeared to be that adding “in the” to the title improved the emotional content of the headline despite the fact doing so added to the length of the title.

Implications

What should we make of this result? Artificially intelligent writing software encourages emotionally charged and/or misleading headlines to attract the attention of search engines on the Internet. Given the volume of prose spewedonto the Internet every day, such attempts would seem a minor deception in order for a writer’s copy to receive a glance, much less a full reading. But extend that approach to the full length of each and every article compounds the deception, skewing readers’ emotional reactions in the process. Is it any wonder our cultural life is so polarized when the content of our reading material is emotionally charged straight from its initial headline?

What do you think?

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