Writer’s Take on Not Wasting Readers’ Time

Cesar Aguirre writes “[t]elling readers you don’t want to waste their time is already wasting it.” I agree. It comes off as protesting too much. In Staying the Course in Writing in the LLM Moment, I wrote that “[t]he way to convince people that human writing is worth reading is to write well and in one’s own voice—a principle which applies to other forms of art.” While my focus in that article was encouraging writers to not modify their human writing to avoid frivolous LLM allegations, the advice applies well to “wasting time” disclaimers. The best way for a writer to convince someone that he or she is not wasting their time is to write well. As they say, show instead of tell.