Skills

Last summer I wrote about teaching my assistant to reach and to remember. Reach meant tools for looking at the live world; remember meant a small local database that survives between our conversations; and in both cases my part was to name what was missing while the assistant built the way to fill each gap. I closed that essay on a promise I meant: there would be another gap to name next week. This one was in how the assistant writes. The request was four sentences, sent on a Sunday afternoon. I asked the assistant to research what makes written material pleasant to read. Then it was to analyze the gap between that research and the writing skills it already had, and make a plan to fill it. That assignment carried an irony: I was asking a system that cannot feel anything about a sentence to find out what makes sentences pleasant. The answer stepped around the irony rather than through it. Much of pleasant reading turns out to be measurable. ...