Write Like You Talk (2015)

> But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are.

Disagree.

When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences. It's also much easier to express a cohesive, complex thought this way compared to a meandering, directionless sentence.

And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance rather than using a generic word which is much broader. Check out the often reposted article about Webster's 1913 dictionary. Also this is exactly the purpose of the thesaurus. So yes, if done right, you ARE "saying more than you actually are."

> The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago:

>> The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira, all is decadence."

"mercurial" does the trick in the quoted example, does Paul have a patch?

I like a lot of what Graham writes, but I fundamentally disagree with him on this one. Spoken language is the JIT compiler of information transferral. It’s spur-of-the-moment; it’s stream-of-consciousness; it gets the job done by stripping away a lot of nuance and complexity.

Written language is more subtle, more considered, more edited - he states himself that he writes then edits - in his case to make it more “spoken”. By doing this he is removing complexity in the interests of simplicity, and this may well fit with his goal for this work. It is not a general panacea.

I don’t disagree that sometimes it is more useful to have a simple introduction, leading to a more complex and better understanding of a subject before layering on the exceptions and subtleties - there is certainly a place for simplified knowledge transfer, our entire system of education is based on this “lies to children” approach.

What I do disagree with is that it’s a useful go-to rule. The world is inherently complex, and we deal with complexity by introducing layers of abstraction (more of the “lies to children” approach, but this time to ourselves). Not everyone needs to understand the quantum mechanical physics of a positive charge in order to understand that balloons will stick to your hair if rubbed against certain materials, but if you’re trying to explain that, then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed. Sometimes that abstraction is very thin, and the language used will reflect that; at other times, “it just does” is the way to go… party handbooks printed on balloon packets are different to undergraduate textbooks.

So written language, with all its capability for complexity, context, subtlety and nuance should be employed when that capability has a useful effect. That means understanding one’s audience and tailoring to suit, not just a blindly-applied rule to “write as you speak”.

As with so many things Paul Graham: there is a good, important idea here (omit needless words!) but he overshoots the mark, descending into venomous overgeneralizations. The truth is more nuanced: speaking and writing are both important vectors for communication (obviously?), but they are different (delightfully so!) -- with different strengths and weaknesses. Great writing is tight: it crackles. If a word serves that end, it should be used -- knowing that if someone like Graham wants to decry the word choice as "fancy", it reveals more about the critic than the writing.

This is an unconvincing straw man argument. Bad writing is just... bad writing. You can just as easily point to bad speaking and say people should talk more like they write. The fact is, speaking and writing are different, and even within them there are different goals and styles.

While PG's plain-spoken dialectical style attracted me early, and has been effective, I wouldn't call it the end-all-be-all approach to writing. One problem with keeping things conversational is that the substance of the argument can be obscured by flowing narrative that sounds good but doesn't necessarily add up. A dense, precise style might be harder to read—and less politically expedient—but ultimately more effective in establishing the merits of a novel idea.

The most successful writers in the world do not do this, and many who do are not successful. Writing has to be much more precise than speech. Speech has tone, cadence, and body language. Writing does not, so you need to be articulate to get the the desired message and intent across and most importantly avoid confusion. And it has to be interesting enough for the reader to hopefully not give up too soon. This is much harder than speech.

This is mistitled. What it should be is "Write like I talk." Sorry mate but not everyone limits themselves to the stripped back, limited vocabulary of Silicon Valley demotic, even in speech.

There is a good idea in here somewhere, but "write like you talk" is horrific advice that very few people should follow.

"Write casually for a wider audience" might work.

"Avoid complicated sentence structure and unusual vocabulary for a wider audience" might also be good advice.

People don't read in the same way they listen, so one should not write in the same way they speak.

Or, to put it another way, "Gosh, I dunno. Seems kinda like he didn't think that one through, you know? Maybe he knew what he meant, but what he said sure ain't it."

Horrible advice. Most people don't talk well; they ramble, they stumble, they beat around the bush. Do not write in "simple language." Instead, write in plain language: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/media/FederalPLGuidelines.pdf

I don't like this viewpoint at all. Spoken English and written English are different languages, full-stop. You can see this in effect when someone is giving a fully-scripted presentation or talk---it just doesn't sound like speaking, no matter how conversational the text is. This is in large part due to the issue of word choice: speakers must choose their words quickly, so they must transmit their idea using lots of small, common words, while writers have time to think about word choice and select the one that transmits the exact connotation the writer is going for. And that's not to mention the nonverbal cues which add a ton of richness to spoken English. Writing allows you to take time to look over your words which lets you re-gain that richness with poetic devices which really allow your words to flow in a way that would sound unnatural and forced in spoken language. I would go as far as to say that if your writing sounds good spoken, it is not very good writing at all.

> But just imagine calling Picasso "the mercurial Spaniard" when talking to a friend. Even one sentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation.

Why does everything have to be "optimized" with Paul? I'll take verbose misfires any day over rigid plain-speak.

Easy recent counterexamples include, say, Hilary Mantel, Christopher Hitchens, David Foster Wallace, Helen Dewitt.

Each of these wrote brilliantly, in a style very different to how most people talk. Some of them (Hitchens) wrote deliberately in a "high style," successfully and delightfully. Others are, well, simply themselves - Mantel once noted, "You simply cannot run remedial classes for people on the page."

The plain style often misses the joy of language deployed for its own sake, for play. It can be well done, but it's certainly not the only legitimate style.

I will concede that for most people, writing for most practical purposes, the Strunk & White school which Graham is channelling is probably pretty good advice.

When I watch interviews of actors and other well known personalities in the 80s compared to now I can't help notice that the standard of spoken conversation seems to have dropped; lower vocabulary, shorter sentences, more interruptions.

I think it would do a lot of good for people to try to speak more like they write, rather than the other way around.

No, don't. Your writing will read like a transcript of a podcast.

I'm not going to write the same words that I would speak because my reader is not going to process those words in the same way that my listener would.

This is good advice if we ignore the headline completely.

If you want to see what I mean, record yourself talking sometime, a few minutes is fine. Make a transcript, and read that. Ideally, if there's someone around who can do the favor, have that someone edit the errors in transcription and punctuation first, so that part isn't conflated.

It's not going to look anything like good conversational writing.

The flip side is that someone setting out to "write like they speak" will instead succeed in writing in a conversational style, if anything. When that's good is another question.

The old adage "sorry for the long letter I didn't have time to write a short one" has some relevance here if you approach it from the perspective of maximum efficiency and information density. But that is not always the best path to get your idea across. A conversational style presumes you have a longform narrative and the extra elbowroom for nuance and variations on a theme. I dictate a lot from inside a VR headset and I usually work backwards from the spoken paragraphs to an outline form I can then expand on at a later stage in an email for example. Just sending pages of raw transcript is not great if you respect your readers time.

As an aside, the best mix for me is doing Screen Recording walkthroughs of some topic which can communicate so much more info than a written description while keeping the conversation narrowly focused. Video platforms like Loom, mmhmm, yac, Tella, etc all these provide a better way to coordinate discussion when integrated with typical tools like email and thread messengers.

For a moment I thought that the article was about using phonetic language when writing in English, that may have some sense noticing sound alike words that may not be always obvious for the speaker.

But regarding using a different way to express yourself in written and spoken forms, the media, the context and the timing matters. There are some things that we may rely on gestures or attitude that are not transmitted so easily in written form. Is not the same talking to friends face to face, with all the context you have with them, than to white sheet of paper. And you have time, you are not pressed by the people you are talking to to deliver the right word right now, you can make pauses, you can check for the right expression, you can rewrite what you wrote.

It is not so simple, it have its own advantages, but it is not for everything and everyone at all times.

I think the via media is that you should avoid pompous, inflated, vacuous, officious language that obscures more than it reveals[0] (psychiatry speaks of "stilted speech" as a marker of disorder; I would add that it could be a marker of a character flaw). The emphasis should be on coherence and clarity. The aim isn't to avoid "big words", only the inappropriate use of them. People who sprinkle their speech or writing with forced vocabulary are like nouveau riche simpletons who think that the more gold you wear, the better. The solution isn't to shun all gold and live like a scrub who avoids all gold, but someone who knows how and when to use gold. Temperance in dress, temperance in writing and speech, temperate in all things. And what is temperance? A lived respect for the order that follows from the nature of a thing.

I mean, I do prefer to read text that errs on the conversational side, and I do wish more people wrote this way. But writing is a big tent. There's room for people to use all kinds of language.

Note that I'm not talking about jargon here- people can use words with a very specific, technical meaning and still sound conversational to those unfamiliar with the vocabulary, simply by defining it in everyday language and perhaps using the jargon in a clarifying sentence. And it depends on your audience too, of course. An engineer talking to other engineers can assume a certain level of technical sophistication, and attempts to "dumb down" the conversation would just hinder the group's progress.

Instead, I'm referring to language that (to my ears, at least) sounds pretentious and melodramatic, like the example PG gave. If someone's writing sounds overly ornate to me, then I'm probably not their target audience. And that's fine. The world doesn't revolve around me. That same audience might read my writing and think it doesn't sound ornate enough. Different strokes etc. etc.

Also, "the medium is the message". We don't speak in paragraphs, but we do write with them. This gives us the opportunity to convey ideas in a differently-organized way than we would when we're speaking, which in turn affects the way people receive our message and the take-aways they leave with.

"The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira, all is decadence." "

Actually I could imagine Neil Oliver would say something like this in one of his documentaries.

Anyone who has tried to dictate something instead of typing it knows how far off Graham is in this advice. Writing is a different medium than spoken language and reading is different than listening. Readers have different expectations than listeners. The cadence of sentence length is important, and the exact words you use count more. The pace of writing allows one to pick and choose more carefully - being more descriptive or precise as needed - and readers expect this.

He may have meant "conversationally," but that depends on context and your audience. This comment has a completely different tone than I would use in a professional document. Bad writing is bad writing, whether it's an academic paper, a blog post or a legal brief. It doesn't have anything to do with writing like you talk.

All that said, it is a good place to start writing, especially if you are having trouble organizing your thoughts or getting started. Imagine sitting in front of someone and explaining to them what it is you want to convey. Write that all down as if you're chatting. But then go back and edit. And that's a second good bit of advice: Writing is editing.

God no. “Write like you talk” is exactly what causes the drivel my poor wife has to grade all day.

She teaches college English and lit and the crap people turn in is mind blowing. They can barely string together a coherent sentence verbally and they turn around and write the same way…

And I am far from a poster child of “skilled writer”, but , damn, is it bad.

How much of PG's blog is based on setting up strawmen and using them to bash on the liberal arts?

> Even one sentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation. And yet people write whole books of it.

These sentences immediately identify one big, relevant difference between speech and non-blog writing, which is not commented on in the blog post: people do not generally give book-length monologues on a single topic. Books will necessarily end up using more flowery language because if they didn't they would be extremely boring to read.

> perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are.

On the other hand, simpler words and sentence structure give the reader the false impression that you're being more honest than you actually are. Demagogues (especially of the right-wing variety) have known this for centuries: people like simple ideas. Making an idea sound simpler, even if at the expense of actual clarity, means that people will agree with you more readily. That can be dangerous.

But even assuming you're communicating in good faith, sometimes you really need the nuance that only more sophisticated language can grant. In speech, we tend to do this by inflection, body language, and gestures; in writing, those aren't available, so we do it with vocabulary choice and more careful sentence structure. In English (and many other languages), a single spoken word can have dozens of different connotations, or a sentence dozens of meanings, depending on tone and emphasis (see https://bridgeenglish.com/blog/2012/08/28/who-stole-the-mone... for a classic example). In writing, we have to be more precise with the words themselves.

All of that said -

> If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers

is probably true, but I think it says more about 95% of writers than it does about what's actually good. In most disciplines, the techniques it takes to become "not terrible" are qualitatively different from the techniques it takes to be "good". I would posit that writing is one of those; the best writers are fundamentally treating the written word differently than those of us who just want to get through the day and be understood on a basic level. Moreover, "top 5 percent of writers" is not really that good, considering that most readers are reading the same vanishingly small fraction of writers. Even in a professional capacity, where you're going to read design docs and such from a wider array of writers (as opposed to the extreme power-law distribution of novelists), I'm certain that the top 1 in 20 writers in my company are read way out of proportion to everyone else, and some of them are still terrible writers.

Success at writing has almost everything to do with who is doing the writing, not the quality of the writing or how clear it is. Michael Crichton demonstrated this himself at Harvard by turning in an essay written by Orwell, unbeknownst to the teacher, and got a "B-". I have seen this as well. Why do Glen Greenwald articles get so much traffic even though it's just basic political commentary? Because of his brand. Writing and the 'creative arts' has always been sorta a popularity contest or clique. That's why it's called a 'literary scene' or an 'art scene'. At least STEM is not so bad in this regard.

Yet another pg classic.

When I first read this essay, it made me go from writing 90% similar to the way I talk, to 100% - literally only writing words and phrases I'd realistically say in a conversation. And I think it's been a good improvement!

Eh so like I think this maybe is primarily good advice for people who are good, like naturally good advice, no I mean speakers, not people like me who like can barely keep the tail end of a thought in my head... co- uh co- coherenty ... like.

Writing and speaking are such different media – for example, you can go back and reread a sentence, but you can't wind back time in a live conversation; you can signal how something should be interpreted,* give parsing hints, and add emotion using inflection and tone while speaking, but you can't do this in writing. So I think we should expect good writing to look different than good speaking.

PG might have in mind then the strange affectations that seem to grip people sometimes when they write, but I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.

*sarcasm, e.g.

Three core mediums that transfer human knowledge:

- spoken words (live events, political speeches, etc)

- recorded words

- written words (blogs, books, papers)

Spoken words have the highest activation energy. Hence, the value that we expect is very very high. There is commitment of time.

Recorded words are speeches, discussions, lectures. Lower than listening something live.

Written words have the highest volume in today’s society. Also the lowest activation energy for the writer.

If written words are not edited, thought through, the increasing volume adds to the noise rather than a better signal.

A lot of this blog post reminded me of https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel.... I am not well-read though, so maybe I just like to pattern match to the few essays I've read that have stuck with me.

When you talk you talk custom calibrating to who and the environment (place and time). When you write that expands to a whole lot more diversity of mindsets. As much as I like and agree with many points that PG publishes, as general advice I'd say this is terrible advice adding that it would be okay advice if it would have been more modest, as in Blog Like You Talk for example.

Something comes over most people when they start painting. They paint in a different way than if they were sending a photo to a friend. The image structure and even the colours are different. No one uses a "canvas" in a photo. You'd feel like an idiot using a "canvas" instead of a "camera" when creating an image to send to a friend.

Personally I advocate that people at least try to see if the flow of the writing makes any sense when read out loud—if not, it's probably just poor writing, stemming from a braindump with little organization. And as the very minimum, it would be nice if people stopped putting long-winded parenthetical additions in the middle of unfinished sentences.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see so many diverging with Paul on this point.

“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”

My take is: don't let language get in the way of expressing yourself. Language is one of our most important social constructs. Restricting yourself to simple language has the side effect of losing precision and/or meaning in communication.

I'm curious how this sentiment of pg's rhymes with his two languages, Arc and Bel. As a person who has written a Bel implementation, I find one of the traits the language has is that it's trying to be "straightforward" in the same way spoken language is.

Whey if a wrert like a taa'ked, a divn't think anyone would kna what a wa' gaan an aboot...

There is a good message here if you don't get distracted by whatever may particlarly bother you about the presentation.

> You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. [...] Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.

I interpret this as following my basic mode of operation: express everything as simply as I can, even if that makes my brilliant idea sound so obvious. The goal isn't to make myself seem smart, it's to get the idea across. With practice this is natural and you find yourself able to express more complex things than you thought you could. If I use complex ways of describing less complex things I'd be putting a lower limit on what I could express.

Basically, how would Richard Feynman say it? He was a master of using the simplest descriptions of the most complex subjects.

The same goes for coding style. There is a time where fancy metaprogramming will be needed to make something compact and manageable. But that isn't the first thing you should reach for in simpler cases.

> And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak.

I guess I've been hanging out with different crowds. I typically find that the harder the subject the more exacting the language has to be to avoid miscommunication.

This is all true and I think mercurial is an excellent word. Spoken and written.

That's called "writing in the vernacular."

Works pretty well, but tends to draw sneers from purists.

Meh. I don't particularly care. People tell me they enjoy reading my stuff. I enjoy writing it.

The better than 95% of writers bit bugs me. It feels like looking at all of written history and saying everyone else was doing this wrong because they don't write simply enough.

Being grandiloquent does not equate to being more intelligent, you're just being superfluous when more terse and lean sentences are better.

Once I made an experiment: I wrote a book chapter like I was writing tweets. It felt a bit like a zip file.

Having your voice in writing is a difficult milestone.

I see some people on HN, presumably Americans, start sentences with 'Like,...'

I find it annoying and it dims my view of the poster.

Uhh no