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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

People should not write as they speak, nor, usually, speak as they write. That they should is a favorite fallacy of schoolteachers. The written and spoken versions of a language are slightly different dialects; what works on the page is often less than optimal to the ear, and the tricks and colloquialisms of conversation are out of place in most written contexts.

I shudder to think what this electronic nanny would make of the prose of Nabokov or Poe. The former author described Hemingway as a “writer of books for boys.”

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Sorry but no. The dominant perspective on writing in academia teaches people to do exactly what you are saying. This is what is taught in undergraduate English classes. The unconventional wisdom is to Write Like You Speak. So it's more about unlearning popular things like "bureaucratese" and corporate speak. Poetry and literature aside, most of us are better off writing in plain English if we want to do well professionally.

The Plain English Campaign lays it out well:

"The main advantages of plain English are: it is faster to write; it is faster to read; and you get your message across more often, more easily and in a friendlier way."

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/how-to-write-in-plain-english....

> This is what is taught in undergraduate English classes

This pedagogy says more about undergraduate writing capabilities than ideal writing standards. Most students entering college need to be taught basic writing fundamentals so that they can then learn to violate them appropriately as maturing writers. The same is true for any art or craft: you develop foundational skills and learn strict rules to understand when it is appropriate to break them.

The Plain English campaign is much more persuasive for the workplace, where being easily understandable is a very high priority, but Plain English is not appropriate for all writing.

> The dominant perspective on writing in academia teaches people to do exactly what you are saying.

Dominant perspective among whom? Surely not the entirety of Academia. Very few academic writing I've seen are written in plain (let alone "as you speak") English.

Complex sentences, peppered generously with subordinate clauses and participle phrases, are common throughout STEM, social science and the humanities alike. Passive voice is likewise used throughout. Obscure vocabulary ("The mercurial Spaniard") is perhaps considerably more common within humanities.

Yes, many (perhaps most?) English Writing instructors are advocating a certain form of plain English - one which is typified by your quote. This school of thought dates at least as far back as The Elements of Style. And you'll find most of the admonitions the Hemingway Editor throws at you in there: Write short sentences, shun the passive voice, purge your adjectives and adverbs.

And despite this particular school of prescriptive linguistics (let's call it the Strunk and White school) being dominant in English Writing teaching in the US[1] for over half a century, little came out of it.

It's rather ironic that at the very same time that the Strunk and White school gained foothold with English teachers and the public, English departments in American universities have embraced post-structuralism to such a degree that the very concept of "English departments" became synonymous with "postmodernists" for many people. This post-structuralism is the driving force behind most of the entrants of the Bad Writing Contest: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.den...

Now, even if I were to agree that the Strunk and White school I described above is really dominant in practice (and not just in theory), I don't think that the plain English they advocate for is "spoken language". GP has claimed that spoken and written language are two, slightly different, dialects. I would venture further and say they are vastly different.

First, the medium: Spoken language is carried over multiple channels: the phonemes themselves, tone, loudness and rhythm[2]. Out of the channels above, writing only replicates the phonemes (with letters) and an extremely limited approximation of rhythm (with punctuation). Of course, written language has its own unique properties such as division into chapters with headings and paragraphs and styled text: italic, bold, underlined and so on.

The different medium creates a different dialects in practice. Taking your quote from above, I think a more faithful rendition of something that naturally appears in speech might be:

"So, the main advantages of plain English are: yeah, obviously it's faster to write and read; and you also get your message across a lot more, it's a lot easier, friendlier, you know."

I'm not a native speaker, so my rendition is probably not as natural as it could be. And the punctuation doesn't even begin to do any justice to all the missing prosodic elements. But this how spoken language really is.

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[1] I haven't delved into this deeply myself, but I'd dare to guess that the UK English Writing instruction landscape was originally more influenced by Fowler's Modern English Usage than by Strunk and White.

[2] All the non-phonemic elements of speech are often collectively referred to as "Prosody" or sometimes Suprasegmentals.

Most of your comment makes me think I should write more like I speak.

I tend to write and speak pretty similarly depending on the situation. Something informal like a comment thread, I write a lot closer to the way I actually speak. Though...I probably swear a lot less.

Formal writing though is something totally different.

Whatever kind of writing you have to think of the audience and the tone you want to convey.

When I want to write conversationally, I try and emulate the way I talk, when I want to write in a different way, I change the tone of my writing.

This comment went more towards the formal, explanatory style in the end I suppose.

I've always found context matters the most for the tone of writing though.

Sometimes a natural, conversational style emulating the way you speak is good, sometimes not.

But it's the same for speaking as well. Speaking in front of people or in some kind of formal situation is a totally different kind of speaking than chillin' with your friends at a party.

You don't speak the same way in those two situations, it's the same with writing. It always depends on the audience and the context.

Absolutely.

I find that the best writing is kind of conversational. It obviously depends on what it is (technical document, memoir, Medium tutorial), but I find the kind of writing you're doing here reminds me of a college admissions essay. It's like a teenager in a button down shirt and tie. I respect the effort, but I don't take it seriously.

I think Obama's recent book is a good example of rich but not overly done writing.

> I shudder to think what this electronic nanny would make of the prose of Nabokov or Poe.

You want fun, just try feeding it some actual Hemingway.

To communicate best, you should like the reader speaks.

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