Understandable enough
My native language is Swedish. We get to learn English early on in school, and I would say my vocabulary and grammar skills are about average for a Swede.
When I started blogging in English, I wrote in Swedish and used a translation tool. Then proofread and edited the text before publishing. It was time consuming and the end result often felt like a washed out version of the original piece.
After a while, I started writing in English from scratch. I tried various proofreading tools to fix grammar and Swenglish expressions. It worked ok, but it also made me feel like a “bad writer” seeing all those errors.
Then a tool came along that some of you might have heard of: AI. I went from Gemini to ChatGPT to Claude, fine-tuning my prompt along the way in an effort to stay true to my original. This is what the latest version looked like:
Act as a copy editor, not a writer. Preserve my voice at all costs. Fix only grammar, spelling, punctuation, and phrases that would sound unnatural to native English speakers. Do not improve style, strengthen wording, increase fluency, or make the text more professional. If a sentence is understandable and sounds like something a Swedish blogger might naturally write in English, leave it unchanged.
It works quite good when it comes to proofreading. I read the suggestions and change the ones I agree on. Always by hand instead of copy/paste, since it’s more likely to also actually learn something.
But there’s one thing that AI hasn’t been able to help me with. On the contrary, it’s made it worse. Self-confidence.
It’s like any AI always will find something that could be made a little better. Maybe it’s a digital self-preservation instinct, AI realizing that it has to remain useful to stay alive.
Anyway, after having read Sylvia’s beautiful post Being imperfect is perfection, I thought to myself: to hell with it. I’ll just write the way it comes out of my mind, packaged with a Swenglish ribbon.
I think you’ll be able to read it. Maybe even get a little giggle along the way. It’s on me for free.
Tack och hej, leverpastej!