The other day I was brainstorming content for a speech and I asked Claude: > rewrite your last response but in the style of Strunk and White, with very little metaphor, less flowery, much more direct, plain, and minimal? What it returned was still pretty flowery, so i said: > This is still unnecessary metaphor: "The story is the on-ramp". It removed that and a few other metaphors, but many remained. After a few more iterations, I could still not get Claude to omit needless words or stop using metaphor. Then I had an idea. I told Claude: > Pretend to be E.B. White and write criticisms of the above text And it worked! E.g., Claude (pretending to be EB White) said: > "Openness moved you." Openness moves no one; it has no hands. Now that's what I'm talking about. Also: > You have also let the office in. "Turn to the upside." "Hand off to the agenda." "Close on momentum." These are not English; they are the noises men make in meetings. I was happy. This seemed to be working! (Though I thought it was ironic how flowery the tone of the criticism itself was, I don't imagine E.B. White would ever say "noises men make in meetings".) So then I said: > "rewrite the above as though you are White and apply all of the changes you advocated for" And Claude finally produced what I had been looking for in the first place, a bunch of simple declarative sentences about concrete things that add up to a strong point stated only once. A few reflections: 1) frontier LLMs can be more effective when you separate out reasoning (e.g., "critique this as EB White") and action (e.g., "now factor that feedback in") into two requests. 2) asking an LLM to impersonate a specific famous human is a high-information type of instruction. I've been using the same technique with coding agents: "critique that design doc as Ken Thompson" (or John Ousterhout, etc.)