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Issue 22.6 ('Preemptive Threads')
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More Grammar Editing

Using ChatGPT for proofreading

Issue: 22.6 (November/December 2024)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 13,410
Starting Page Number: 61
Article Number: 22608
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project22608.zip Updated: 2024-10-31 23:47:25

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

I know you're probably sick of me continuing to work on my ChatGPT Grammar Editor project, but they say, "write what you know"—and this happens to be a useful tool I'm using for the magazine.

The more I use my app, the more little things bug me, and I need to fix them. Last time, I wrote about updating the app to use OpenAI's new 4oMini model. This is working well, but the results it returns have some consistent flaws. These may not be flaws for most folks, but they interfere with my particular workflow.

For example, here at xDev, we have been using Markdown for articles for many years now. I love that it's a plain text format. Plain text is readable by any editor and will be good for hundreds of years in the future—which might not be the case for proprietary text formats.

But I want my plain text to be really plain— I don't even use smart ("curly") quotes or em-dashes, as those are special characters— and those can be automatically replaced when I convert my files to XML for use in the magazine.

ChatGPT seems to do okay with quote marks, but it stubbornly wants to change my plain text dashes ("—") into em-dashes ("--"). This annoys me. It shows up as a difference when I compare files (ChatGPT's corrected version to the original).

While it's quite possible I could modify this behavior via my prompt, I'm not really very good at prompts, and it seems like it would be difficult to tell ChatGPT to stop doing all the little annoying things it does by default.

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