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Comment by zabana | Hacker News Reader

Non native English speaker writing: I have perfect understanding of the language and I can even differentiate between different accents, but one of things I struggle with the most is written communication. I don't seem to be able to express my thoughts as fluidly as I can orally. My brain just freezes out whenever I try to write "complicated" sentences which I find extremely irritating. I don't know why this is and would love some pointers on how to improve my (and others in the same boat) writing skills.

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In my freshman creative writing class at university, my professor recommended using stream of thought and it seemed to work very well.

Just literally start writing everything you think, as you think it, everything, just write it. Don’t fret over spelling or even bother with punctuation, no matter how disjointed, just stream and eventually you begin to somehow fall into focus and the words will flow much much better.

Once you’re finished and have gotten your point across, just go back and edit.

We all kinda looked at each other and rolled our eyes because it sounds so strange, but it really does seem to work.

For those interested in learning more about this method, Peter Elbow is the relevant author. His books Writng without Teacher and Writing with Power go into more details.

> Writng without Teacher

Feel like you might have taken the "don't fret over spelling" part of the method a bit too literally here.

I have to admit I am a little bit disappointed that its not the actual title of the book

Yeah. I blame it on fat fingering on a phone.

For reference, it’s actualy Writing without Teachers.

Thanks for letting me know.

This is good advice, because it also forces you to learn to edit what you've written. What I've seen is that editing is a separate skill from writing that needs some effort to learn.

Maybe editing is not that important for blog posts. Shorter texts can sometimes be written in one pass, but for producing anything longer it's a vital skill.

+1 for this. I know it works for me, but I still get stuck sometimes trying to get the sentence perfect the first time. But this only slows me down. Once I have something, it is relatively easier to edit it into a good sentence than it is to find a good sentence from the beginning.

I think it is the same way when I write code. First get something to work, then refactor it works really well.

PG's essay on writing says this too, this helps a lot

I (and a lot of others) call this "word vomit", and it's definitely very helpful.

I do something similar with code, "code vomit" (how creative). Do whatever it takes to get the damn thing working, then go back over it and apply as many good coding principles as you can.

I think the more crude advice of "write drunk, edit sober" comes from a similar line of reasoning; alcohol is the push to start the stream of consciousness.

There is nothing wrong with adopting a more conversational style for professional writing, particularly in our industry. If you were in e.g. academia, failure to adopt the consensus tone of journal articles might be career-limiting, but you can get a way with an awful lot in tech.

Your comment seems comprehensible; I wouldn't have been surprised to see it from a native speaker in an internal email thread.

My biggest concrete suggestion is to write 10X more in 2019 than you did in 2018, and explicitly ask people for feedback on it. (10X is a pretty big leap, but most people write far, far less than they think they do, and the cure for being inexperienced is experience.)

> My brain just freezes out whenever I try to write "complicated" sentences which I find extremely irritating.

Don't do this. Follow "The Economist Style Guide" instead:

"Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible."

I like the version of a former judge on Germany’s Supreme Court: “Think like a philosopher, write like a peasant”.

If only German philosophers had taken that advice.

A guest lecturer from Germany comes to a university classroom and begins giving his speech in German. After five minutes, a bored student gets up to leave.

"No, wait!" interjects the German lecturer. "I've almost gotten to the verb!"

In tsarist Russia, authors were paid by the page, which is why Dostoevsky's stories are so verbose and indirect. I don't know what's Nietzsche's excuse.

Or German peasants!

There are some writers that seem to produce work that is just incompatible with my brain.

A recent example for me is Sam Harris' book Waking Up. It feels like somebody could take that book, remove some ornamentation, and state the ideas more plainly. It isn't a difficult text, but I find myself having to reread pages to clear the fog more than I normally do.

This is very good advice. I think my problem is I try to sound more "intelligent" and well-spoken. Maybe that's because English isn't my first language. In any case, the most annoying thing for me is to not be able to tap into my inner thesaurus. When I read other people's articles, comments and book I often find myself thinking "why did I not use that turn of phrase in my previous blog post".

I can sympathize with you, as I shared the same woes. Don't torture yourself though. Quite often the ornamental form simply hides the lack of intellectual depth in the content. Free yourself from such thoughts and the rest will follow.

I really recommend "The Economist Style Guide". Please read through it, then read again to see how it was applied to itself (!). Then write a short passage, and revise it to adhere to the recommendations -- don't be surprised if this will need several passes though!

You will be surprised how much this can improve your writing, but also structure your own thoughts.

Trying to sound intelligent can actually have the opposite effect. I like the quote "If you can't explain something simply then you don't understand it well enough."

As for picking up idioms, I think it's something that happens gradually as you are exposed to more writing by native speakers.

Very good advice, I'll save that quote.

Also, if you’re struggling with how to phrase something, try omitting it instead.

I think there's a difference between lean prose and choppy prose. [1]

Lean prose (Hemingway) is elegant simplicity.

Choppy prose (most amateur writers) is tiring and jarring.

Despite their seemingly shared characteristic of simplicity, it takes a lot of practice to achieve the former.

[1] https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/common-writing-m...

Not that it may mean much to you, but your writing here is far better than many native English speakers I know. You writing is better than many US-born people I went to university with.

The old adage "write drunk, edit sober" applies here. The real point is to stop censoring. Writing is really two skills:

- Building the habit - Being comfortable editing out things that don't work

BTW, the your original post came across clearly and was solidly written. Your prose will come with practice :)

Get to it! :D

Edit: Hilariously, this is also on the front page now, https://goinswriter.com/write-drunk/ but they are being disingenuous in their interpretation.

In the statement of the problem, I detect no trace of the problem, therefore I offer no solutions. The length and complexity of each of these four sentences is within the window of what I consider tasteful. One could write sentences more complex, or infinitely complex, but that's mostly to be avoided, in my opinion. Complex sentences, unless written with great care and subtlety, tend to call attention to themselves and to the writer, and that's a failure. If I'm distracted thinking about how the writer is showing off, I'm no longer thinking about what I'm reading.

Meanwhile, strategically sprinkling in the occasional short simple sentence is a fine way to achieve various desired effects, including variety of cadence. And of course there have been famous and successful writers of English who have gone farther than that, to the point of choppiness - most notably Ernest Hemingway. "I had no feeling for him. He did not seem to have anything to do with me. I felt no feeling of fatherhood." To me that also starts to draw attention to itself, but at least he can't be accused of being bombastic or grandiose.

Funny, I'm the other way around.

Anyway, what I do if I sort-of know what I want to write: open a word process or anything, set it to a bullet list, then start to write. The bullets can be really short or somewhat longer if I happen to think of a nice way to write something down, but by being bullets, it's clear that it's not the final form, and that I can "cheat" and just write down a few keywords as long as it's clear to me what I want to write.

This allows be to easily move things around, and write about as quickly as I think, and thus end up with a bullet list with proper structure for what I want to write. I can then relatively easily convert that to a proper story.

(That's not how I wrote this comment, so it's bound to feel somewhat more chaotic/stream-of-consciousnessy.)

>I don't know why this is and would love some pointers on how to improve my (and others in the same boat) writing skills.

Read a lot of different kinds of writing and keep on writing yourself. Eventually you'll develop better skills.

If you mostly write on a particular subject, read how others express things in that domain.

Try to describe something complicated and then compare it to how people regarded as great communicators approached the same subject.

Did you ever try to use speech-to-text-software? I have written dictandu for that: https://www.dictandu.com/

You can just dictate like you would talk and averwards use the style and spelling assistant to improve what you dictated.

I use speech to text for Chinese a lot. Or a smartphone keyboard. Or I write on paper, scan it and send it to someone to type it out and edit it. Cool that you work on things like that, I’ll check it out when I get home!

(Also non-native English speaker) I feel the same way. I think that when I speak, my listener gives me cues (e.g., nodding or frowning) and I react to them: I reformulate if they seem confused or I keep going if they look satisfied. When I write, I don't have that immediate feedback, and I typically write more than is necessary. My writing suffers because it takes too long to convey ideas that are not confusing, but that I fear may be. The old adage "keep it simple, stupid" applies also to writing, and it's really hard.

By the way, I thought that this paragraph that you wrote was perfect, very easy to understand. If you write like this all the time, then don't worry: people will understand you.

Interesting. That's backwards for me. I usually wish I could go back in time and reformat what I'm saying multiple times as easy as I can move a text cursor. I also wish people wouldn't get impatient with me while I blabber nonsense until I can get my thoughts in order and spew out a few concise/complicated sentences that I'll need to repeat a few times with hand gestures for them to understand what I'm saying. I wish they could also go back in time and rehear what I said however many times they need. Heck, that goes for me, too. I wish I didn't need to ask people to repeat what they said so many times.

1) is to get over the need for complicated sentences to express complicated ideas. you don't need big words or convoluted sentences to "sound intelligent", even if you have a vast vocabulary. "write like ernest hemingway" is the best writing advice i have ever been given.

2) just write more, it's a practiced skill. being able to understand different "dialects" of english is actually a superpower you can use to your advantage as a non-native speaker. publish whatever you write. solicit feedback. you'll always write better than 10 essays ago.

One thing that might help (and certainly won't hurt): read more.

If you read properly written English (I'd exclude from this much of the web and academic writing), you'll start absorbing the patterns.

Choppy sentences are a common problem in writing, and there are prescribed ways of dealing with them. [1][2]

[1] https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/WritingGuide/05choppy.htm

[2] https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/10875/what-can-i...

I highly recommended reading some Hemingway. He has a very beautiful writing style. It's a masterclass in efficiency.

I have to write academic work in a rigid format, but I try to mimic much of his style in my other writing (reflective pieces, opinion pieces, formal communications at work...).

There's also an app/webpage called the Hemingway editor I would recommend.

If it could help, maybe you are talking about http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

Yes, that's the one. I didn't have a bookmark for it on my phone. Thank you for linking to it.

Are you immersed in the English speaking world everyday ? At work, at home, etc. ? Then it'd make sense things come easier to you verbally. I also believe we express less complex thoughts in oral communication compared to written sentences. Because we are obliged to keep it simple to keep the flow going. YMMV though.

I wonder if you would find it helpful to write in an app like http://hemingwayapp.com or Grammarly.

I'll echo others that this post reads well, better than many native speakers I work with.

Beyond that, my advice to almost all writers is to read your work out loud.

Better yet, have your computer read it to you.

Unless you are writing something literary, why do you want to write complicated sentences? writing is just a means to communicate if you deprive a section of your readers(say non native english speakers) your writing failed!

For the problem of struggling to write but fine with oral communication my suggestion is to just record your thoughts orally on your phone/laptop transcribe them using google docs and than your job would be reduced to editing rather than writing from the scratch which looks easier to me but i can be wrong.

Read a lot of books of various style and content. Meanwhile, practice writting in a rewarding and safe environment. That's it.

You can only improve it by practicing it. You will get better over time as long as you keep on practicing.

Is it any easier if you write first in your native language, then translate?

This is typically a very bad way to write a good text, as you will use idioms that simply are inefficient to use in the target language. If I would write a text in Swedish and then translate it to English, my workload would likely more than double.

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