What does it mean to “write like you talk”?

As a kid who was a voracious reader, also called a geek by myself (cringily lol) and by others, some quotes that resonated then and still do now:

> Geek kids read many more words than they speak. As a result, when geek kids do talk, they talk like a book.

> They use fully formed sentences, complete with subordinate clauses; if you listen hard, you can almost hear semicolons and parentheses.

> Many geeks, though, speak with "-v" turned on

> In fact, many geeks are so offended by the very idea of telling others what to do that they spend all their lives in the declarative voice, and never use the imperative voice at all. These are the geeks who recoil from moving into management.

The top comment said -

"If you've ever read a verbatim transcript of an interview or conversation, you'll know that actual speech is anything but clear. When talking off the cuff, even the most clear minded people tend to ramble, um and ahh, double back, talk across each other, and jump between points and subjects. When listening to someone in person, our brains seem to edit what they say on the fly to make it comprehendible, focusing on the important bits and forgetting the rest. When it's presented in written form, such as in a newspaper or magazine article, a skilled journalist has usually done the editing for us.

This means that what we consider a “conversational” tone in written language is not a representation of natural communication so much as an idealised version of it. That doesn't mean it isn't useful to strive for it, particularly in business and academic writing that otherwise tends towards the turgid, but it isn't as simple as telling people to “write how you talk”. Writing conversational prose that achieves clarity whilst not being oversimplified, patronising or banal requires practice and skill.

I also think, conversely, that while a conversational tone can improve formal writing about complex topics, the reverse can be true. It's possible to enliven mundane topics by being less direct and more playful with language."

Full thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448445

Years later, when writing my thesis I'd routinely find myself at a loss of how to communicate a concept. The solution was always to write down my answer to the question "what are you trying to say".

Source: Writing for more than half my life and HN has liked some of my articles in the past

The end result is when speaking, I use a slightly more formal version of speech, and that helps me organize my thoughts on the fly in conversation. When speaking written speech, I speak more formally than I do in conversation, but the pacing and pattern is different. I think ahead of what I want to say and then try out 2 or 3 different forms before I actually say what I want into the recognition environment. Then I let Grammarly tell me how I'm an uneducated hick that don't speak good.

If you read Orwell, his message is not necessarily that complex language is worse at transmitting ideas, as he's actually arguing that complex language can hide the speaker's real motivation and deceive more easily.

For Paul Graham, I'd say for him the 'write like you talk' is very good advice since he's interacting with founders whose first language is not English, people with different backgrounds from his, young folks that maybe didn't take an academic route, so for him it checks out to recommend it.

Leslie Laport always talks about how you should always write down what you think. Until you write something down, you only think you're thinking. Also, he's all about writing most things in math over English, since math is less ambiguous (and less complex). And I'd say math is quite different from how you talk.

Now, you can notice how you can have different motivation for the same behaviour (Orwell and Graham), or different behaviour for a similar motivation (Orwell and Lamport). Maybe more interestingly, think about people with the opposite intentions from the ones above: a contractor that wants to mimic sophistication to get a contract with a bank (with representatives also mimicking sophistication); guilds trying to preserve a high barrier of entry. The advice they'd appreciate would be the opposite since their goals differ.

This only goes for specific cases, of course. E.g. it probably applies more to business language than to novels.

For instance, with writing, you can use different variable names. With speaking, you are limited to using 'this' and 'that'. When speaking, you can using different intonations, but while writing you cannot.

I flatter myself into thinking that I am a eloquent and concise speaker, having listened to my self talk, I can say thats not the case.

The joy (and curse) of writing is that you can condense everything down into nice, tight paragraphs. You can re-order arguments in a way that doesn't make sense orally.

If a rich person tells you to write like you talk, its because they either have the privilege of a journalist editing their quotes and stringing them together in a way that makes sense, or people read what ever mountains of waffle they produce because they are rich.

The point of writing is to get your point across in as fewer words as possible, the point of talking is to socially interact, they only sometimes align well.

"Write in a way that makes your readers feel like you are talking to them."

Which seems like an epistolary version of one possible (maybe also better specified) paraphrase

  Code like you think -> Code so that the machine can think

I wonder if there’s a way to train that ability.

It usually comes off as excessively childish for multiple reasons, including the fact that you can just not write filler words where not saying them can take practice.

This is what "write like you talk" looks like: https://yaky.dev/2026-04-01-ridiculous-reddit/reddit-601.jpg

And academic and technical writing should absolutely be lexically dense. It's not poetry, you're trying to express information as efficiently as possible.

I write how I think, and how I think is profoundly shaped by reading, listening, and absorbing.

Write how you talk seems almost arrogant. Writing is an expression of an idea, and how I speak vs. how I write are so vastly different it really does amuse me to chew on this.

I suppose TFA is mostly focused on academic writing [0] (article quote) but the vast, vast majority of people in this world today are not writing academically, they're posting here, or sending a text, or work emails. Good writing means you don't need to assume everyone is an expert or a non-expert. The first thought that comes to my mind here is "mansplaining".

[0] So the common advice to "write like you talk" can be underspecified. It's good to avoid pretentious and formulaic cliches that mask the absence of precise thought, and separately to avoid dense and impenetrable jargon that's hard for non-experts to understand.

This is easy to say if you can write, but, what if you are trying to write in a second language?

As an English person, I can write reasonably well without having to know what any of the technical terms for writing mean. I don't need to know any formal rules for writing in different tenses, and even Oxford commas just happen automagically. I can break the rules too, not that I even know what the rules are.

Over the years I have worked with a lot of people from other parts of the world that have English as their second language. They can't write in English purely on instinct, 'writing as one might talk', they are stuck trying to remember the rules and the billions of exceptions to the rules that English has, just to make it hard for the second-language crew. Of course, in Britain, we can slip into Cockney Rhyming Slang, Glaswegian or West Country Speak (tm), for not even the Irish or the Americans to understand us.

Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.

Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is. They have absolutely no need to know. Whereas the German, speaking his most humourous English, gained from many years of study and watching TV, absolutely knows what a 'past participle' is, but they haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.

Um, er, um, the, um, real problem with writing as one talks is, er, you know, sometimes, we, er, put in lots of ums and ers. That is the real danger of 'writing as one talks', but, when editing the ums out, we dabble and wreck that flow of words that sounded great but didn't look too great on the page.

but the idea is dubious: writing/reading is a different transaction than speaking/listening.

If the average person tries following this advice they'll probably end up with something simpler sounding, and still bad. Which I guess is better than overly complicated and bad? I don't know, doesn't matter, both are bad.

One thing I know for sure though is writing like you talk is dressing down. Sometimes that's good, like when you want to be relatable and down to earth, or maybe you're saying you're a tech bro type, moving fast and no time for nonsense. Other times you should be more formal though.

Again, the great writers don't care, they just pick whatever level of formality makes sense and do their thing.

Try talking like an academic on the street - you'll get laughed out of the alleyway. Informal conversation often needs to target the lowest common denominator, which is the most you can expect from the average person out in the "real world;" that is, of course, unless you are reading from a prepared speech - which is the composition of a speechwriter, prepared ahead of time, instead of improvised on the spot. Writing can target more advanced audiences because you're not limited by space and time to the people in your immediate vicinity, but people who self-select into your subject matter - for instance, on fora like this one, which represent a small minority of technically inclined readers.

One can write extemporaneously in this style - that's the IRC and chatroom register of written speech, and it has its place, but I don't think this is the form of writing that the author of the article had in mind. For instance, I doubt that this article was composed one-shot in an IRC chatroom and then published verbatim, but went through many rounds of editing. That's not how "people really talk."

Of course, if one is in more enlightened company, their informal, extemporaneous speech can start to take on more complexity and jargon. You need to target your communication to your audience.

For what it's worth, most of this post was written one-shot with minimal revision, but with pauses to think about what to write next. These kinds of pauses are usually known as "awkward" in every day speech over beers. I will maybe go over the post and make some edits as I read over it again.

"George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!"