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Hi,

Have you ever imagined that computers could, surely, be better than they are today? That they shouldn’t make things so difficult, shouldn’t ask so many questions, shouldn’t make you memorize esoteric commands just to do simple tasks?

So did Jef Raskin. As the first person Apple hired to write documentation, he wanted to build a computer—the first Mac—that removed everything that tripped people up. Tap a key and start typing—no waiting for the computer to boot or for you to come up with a name for the file.

Spoiler: It failed. Steve Jobs came back, turned the Mac into his “bicycle for the mind.” Raskin built his device, but it never sold that well.

Hi!

Did you know that Log in is more popular than Sign in?

I was building Reproof's new landing page recently, and was wondering what's the most popular way to tell people to join your app, enter their account, get help, check terms and policies, and more. I couldn't find a definitive answer—so I dug into 100 SaaS tools' landing pages to find what most sites use on average. And it turns out:

• Sign up and Log in are the most popular ways to tell people to join and access their account.
• Get creative with your primary CTA; almost every site uses something unique there.
• Pricing is always called just that.
• The short Terms and Privacy are more common now than the full-length Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
• Help Center is the most popular term for support sites now.

With GPT-3 and DALL-E, with Google debating how much LaMDA knows itself, is it time to hire a robot to do your writing for you?

A reader asked me recently for my take on AI writing tools—and my first response was that they're great for short bits of text, of questionable value beyond that. I've used simple generated text models at Zapier, for example, to fill in product pair descriptions; that works well. But getting GPT-3 to take on your blog's editorial schedule? My take is that it's not there, not today anyhow, but I wanted to double-check.

Here's a run though what you can expect from AI writing tools today—how they're good when writing about themselves, and fall apart when writing anything more creative. How, perhaps, they're best used as a brainstorming tool to help you find more creative ways to say stuff.

Hey, happy Friday!

There's an idea that I keep seeing everywhere. First it was in Nest founder Tony Fadell's book Build, where he talked about writing the press release for the Nest before they ever started building it. Then it was in VisiCalc's history, where founder Dan Bricklin made a reference card before his team started coding the first spreadsheet. Then it was the Macintosh itself, envisioned first in Jeff Raskin's The Book of Macintosh. And to top it off, Raskin started his career at Apple writing documentation, worked his way into kickstarting the Macintosh project.

Clearly there's something special about documentation, about writing your ideas down first and clarifying them before you start building. So here's the story of documentation and innovation, how some of the products that shaped tech the most started on a sheet of paper.

It's why you should Document first. Then build.

Have a good day!, you type, but that’s what everyone else says, and there’s got to be something better.

So you turn to the thesaurus. Have could be own, keep, maintain, utilize, occupy. Good, in turn, could be fine, quality, superb, exceptional, sterling, first-rate, and so on. Day could be twenty-four hours, but it’s also used as a stand-in for period, era, age.

Rely on a thesaurus alone, and you could end up with Occupy a first-rate era! or Maintain a fine age as your salutation. An insight, perhaps, into how automated translation can go so wrong, but hardly a helpful way to improve your emails.

Yet the idea’s still solid. You don’t want to repeat yourself. Your sentence length can vary enough to let your words sing, only to lose the effect with subpar words. You can only talk about good things so many times before your readers’ eyes glaze over.

Hey there!

After a few weeks of travel—something that, mercifully for anyone with family spread around the world, is making a halting comeback—I’m back with some somewhat jetlagged thoughts on writing, photography, and the creative process to start out your week:

Here stands a tree.

Hey there, happy Friday!

I finally learned my way around the new Google Analytics 4 this week—and made a guide to help you make the switch. After a decade and change of using Google Analytics to track my blog pageviews, see how many people stop by on the average week, and find pages that are linking to my site, I’m used to the older Google Analytics—what Google’s now referring to as Universal Analytics or GA3.

Now it’s going away—and sometime between now and next July, you’re going to have to switch to the new Google Analytics.

So I finally dug in, relocated all the things I usually check (including the Site Content → All Pages view that I visit the most—which now is in a new Pages and Screens dashboard), and found a way to more-or-less replicate the bounce rate now that it’s been removed from Google Analytics.

Hi,

Ever written something, then gone back to read through it, and noticed a section that doesn’t quite fit? Something fun, perhaps, but not right for this piece, this place, this time?

The standard advice is to cut it, to “kill your darlings” in the memorable rendition.

And yet. It’s easy to waver, finger hovering over the delete button. Perhaps this sentence could find new life elsewhere, even if not here?

Happy Wednesday!

There’s something to be said for consistency, publishing every day as Seth Godin has done for years, or weekly as many of the most popular blogs do.

There’s an equal argument for quality, for writing long-form, well-researched articles that few others would take the time to produce.

There’s also something to be said for luck, for the random whims of what’ll flare and what’ll flop.

Hey there,

I don't know how many times I've published something—or, worse, sent an email—only to notice a typo or three moments later.

So when I'm writing something important, I'll print it out and go over it with a pen (an orange one, since I never seem to have a red pen around). And turns out I'm not alone. I've been interviewing writers about their favorite ways to proofread, and while everyone has a trick to improve their writing, paper's still popular.

But it's far from the only way. After talking to over 15 writers, the most popular ways to proofread are to:

Hi,

It's easy enough to think of things you want to write. Inspiration's everywhere.

Editing is a whole other thing. Words flow when you're inspired, but it's far harder to go back and revise them into something great.

So I started searching for the best books on the proofreading and editing process, with tips to help you polish and improve your writing. Here are the best 11 books on proofreading that I've read so far, featuring ‌On Revision, ‌The Subversive Copy Editor, and much more.

Hey there,

Happy Tuesday!

Curious: What’s something you’ve written recently that you’re especially proud of?

And as you were writing it, what was your proofreading process to make sure it was great?

Hey there!

I’ve tried oh so many notes apps. There’s that euphoria of the new; this time, you’re going to remember everything. Only, soon enough, you slowly stop using the app and revert to wherever you were saving notes before.

Dan Shipper hit that this weekend, with his Fall of Roam post outlining where the popular notes apps quit working for him. He found, over time, that most of the notes held little value.

And then it hit me: Maybe that’s the point. We just need somewhere to let go of our thoughts. The value of notes apps is that they let us forget.

If there’s one thing I get the most questions about, it’s Zapier’s roundups. We’d test dozens of apps, write thousands of words, then years later they’d still be the way people would find new tools for their work.

So this week I wrote up some tips I often share with other writers about what I’ve learned from being on editorial teams. There’s a new guide to writing roundups, with tips aimed at writing the software roundups like those I’ve published but that should be helpful for roundup up anything else. Along with that, I shared a tip about how I write titles, intros, and anything else where it’s tough to find the right thing to say. And to round it out, today I shared how to get people to search for your product (hint: They won’t, not at first anyhow, and so you’ll need to find what they are searching for and show up there).

Now, back to building Reproof. Have a great weekend!

Matt + the Reproof team

Hey there,

It's hard to build a new app without wondering where some of today's defaults came from.

When did word processors first start tracking changes?

How did the strikethrough end up being the only proofreading mark that stayed with us as we digitalized documents?

Something breaks, you google the error, and stumble upon a bit of code or a script that promises to cure what ails you. For better or worse, it often works ... for now, that is, until something else breaks, and you google again, until it's copy and paste the whole way down.

That's the bad version of copying, the kind merely good artists do in Picasso's famous quote.

Then there's my weird version of copying that I've found as a trick to get started. Not copying to fix stuff, or copying to rip it off, but copying to get myself to start writing. I'll turn on a song, transcribe the lyrics, and like the momentum of pedaling a bike where you can't immediately stop the flywheel effect, I'll keep writing only this time in my own words.

So here are some thoughts on copying to start, and how to aspire at least to Picasso and Jobs' level of great artists.

Hey there,

The shorter the bit of text, the harder I've always found it to write. You can restate yourself a few times in a longer piece and eventually get your idea across. When it all comes down to a tweet or a title, though, it's this sentence or nothing.

And so I'd sit there at the blank page, watching the blinking cursor keep time instead of writing what I'd set down to write. The first takes were always bad. It's less painful to just imagine what a well-crafted piece would look like than to write an inevitably bad take.

Then it's Friday, your piece is due, and a ticking click is an incredible forcing function to get you to write.