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.
Interestingly and coincidentally, I was reading an old thread from 2015 titled "Write like you talk" written by Paul Graham.
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."
A few decades back when I was a PhD student a British university I taught an undergraduate class and I noticed that the quality of writing in their examination papers and projects was clunky and awkward, in contrast to the admirable, free-flowing, everyday style the way they wrote (as they spoke) on their student bulletin boards. I used to wonder why they didn't write like this in their classwork.
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".
Young academics try to signal that they know what they’re doing so they end up cargo-culting dense technical writing that they can’t yield well and just end up with bad writing.
It takes a lot of confidence to write academic material in a natural conversational tone because they’ve internalized a rule that says “if it’s easy to understand, I won’t come off as smart enough to belong”.
I wrote my 45 pages PhD thesis (physics) in a more conversational tone, using "I" and skipping the introduction (half a page to say that if you need an introduction it is better to read this and that, instead of poorly copied pasted text here).
I got a 5:2 acceptance from the jury (which is extremely rare, normally this is 7:0), with the two saying that the content is very good, but I am desacralizing science... I told them that I am proud of these two rejections there and my wonderful thesis director (truly a fantastic person) jumped in to avoid some brawl :)
The sociologist Bourdieu has written about social capital and the impact of the ductus people aquire. Simplified this is why rich people of old money do not respect the new rich: Sure they have the money, but they do not have the taste, the manierisms, the language, etc. Being part of that part of society is more than just having money.
These details are a more important mechanism for social groups to differenciate themselves with than most people consciously realise in their day to day lives. Yet we constantly decide by minor details that someone does or does not belong to a group. Maybe a steelworker will notice by the way you talk that you never worked in manual labor even if you dress the part.
Most people tend to have multiple such learned manierisms, meaning you will walk, sit, talk differently with your male friends than in an academic setting or with your family for example.
So when young students enter university they undergo a massive adjustment phase where they relate their existing manierisms to the new manierisms they encounter. This is all in order to become and stay part of the group. There is of course a perception how one "is supposed to" write in academia and students try to emulate this to the best of their ability, which may or may not yield good results. Eventually they find their own academic language and aquired tastes.
My current best way to write is to just write everything that amuses me, then go back and edit out the tangents, and then usually reverse the order of the paragraphs.
When news was transmitted by flaky telegraph systems, the first paragraph evolved to be a concise version. The ensuing paragraphs provided layers of detail. If the connection was lost, whatever got through would stand as enough. That is more or less how I write emails for work. The other thing is, tell em what you’re going to say, then say it, then tell em what you told them.
This. Sometimes during hectic times, my bosses need to get the right summary of everything in one phone screen. So I generally try to have mails with a first line summarizing everything in one glance, a short section you can read in an elevator ride, and then everything else.
For example, during Log4Shell, our Group Director of Operations was helping Support and Account Management with scared customers and was just bouncing customer meeting to meeting. Hence, line one of the mail was "Rollout of mitigation 1 to applications estimated by 12:13; delays expected at only internally reachable middleware". After that, a 3-4 sentence paragraph with more details and then a longer explanation in detail, ideally with keywords highlighted and such. Those would be discussed in some peace later on.
A common suggestion is to put the bottom line on the top line. Consider all the articles posted even here that make the reader suffer through the writer's own thinking process before getting to the point.
I don’t know. When I jam out a comment I seem to summarize at the end when I’m done, and then I reread quickly and see the summary made a weird conclusion but was a fine introduction.
I always understood it as advice for school children who don't know how to express themselves in writing and end up with a blank page. You are encouraged to imagine you're talking to someone to overcome the hurdle of translating thoughts into words.
Along similar lines, in elementary school we were taught the introduction/body/conclusion pattern to help organize our thoughts in essays, but actually using those words as headers makes you sound like a child. "Conclusion" is especially common. It just reads like you're blindly following that pattern and don't actually know how to tie your thoughts together.
I remember editing my then girlfriend’s (now wife) papers in university, when she was struggling to explain something succinctly. I’d ask her: well what are you trying to say? And she would explain it to me, clear as day. “Just write that.”
Back in 94, when I first started using speech recognition (Dragon Dictate, word-at-a-time recognition) I had a curious experience. I could feel the difference between speaking spoken speech and speaking written speech. Now I've been using speech recognition for so long, I now swap back and forth relatively easily. This ability to switch how I speak comes in handy when writing dialogue or a speech.
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.
This is largely where I'm ending up, but I started at the other end.
There is value in prose that carries your literal voice when the audience is _people who know you_. There is negative value in writing prose that requires the audience to _read it in your voice_ in order for it to make sense, avoid offense, or convey intent.
My prose changed first: it became plain spoken, as devoid of contextual subtlety as I could make it. My career benefitted. My spoken interactions followed.
The only thing that bothers me about it is the nagging sense that I've become so fucking boring.
I also started at the other end, in the sense that from an early age and for the rest of my life I have spent a lot more time chatting over text than with spoken word.
I mean it's advice from the same man who thought "delve" - a 6000 year old, monosyllabic word used by Shakespeare and Tolkien - was too complicated and should not be used.
I am not sure we should be taking him as a literary authority.
Language is a tool, you have to do what's best for your own goal.
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.
I don't agree with this advice. Reading and Listening are different mediums and they have different strengths and weaknesses. When writing, one should take advantage of the written medium.
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 don't write like I talk, because my speech has a bunch of filler in it. Moreover I am often talking at the same time as forming an opinion. (ie trying to figure out why something is the way it is, by asking questions.)
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.
I also want people to read out loud like they talk. Many people assume a special reading voice that drones huskily with diminished tonal variation, and it's unpleasant to listen to.
One superpower I wish I had is the incredible summarizing into single sentences that you can see in the LLM web UIs when they automatically make a title for a discussion.
If by "train" you mean "learn", it occurs to me you could try applying the "CAR story" interview technique of relating a story in 3 sentence (one each for the Challenge, Action and Result). Once you have it down to 3 sentences, distilling it into one, or producing a title, should become doable. HTH
It’s a very good post — and I do agree with the main ideas. It’s pretty remarkable how good writers like Scott Alexander and others are able to consistently pump out good writing, especially when the key does seem to always comes down to clarity (and mostly revision for me). Maybe reps are able to give that over time, but even with getting older and now being able to bounce ideas off LLMs == it still takes me so many iterations before I feel like my prose / ideas / outlines are worth sharing.
I would like to see them include some analysis of the first recorded audio conversations such as on wax cylinders or the 1930s WPA/Federal Writers’ Project. Was sentence complexity the same as it is now?
The focus on clarity of thought is a modern shift, or at least the "modern preference". Hemingway was a big proponent on short, direct sentences and few or no adjectives.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, complex sentence structure signaled intelligence for both the author and reader. It was a form of entertainment, in a way, when books were few and nights were long. Try reading Henry James for an idea about what this looked like in practice. Shakespeare is another obvious example of "heightened language" besides archaic words the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise).
> the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise)
(Iambic pentameters are 10-syllable lines with alternate syllables unstressed and stressed, like "if MUSic BE the FOOD of LOVE ...", the so-called heartbeat rhythm)
Shakespeare actually used a variety of different styles to demarcate different characters, moods, etc. As a very rough rule-of-thumb in Shakespeare, posh characters speak in iambic pentameters, commoners and clowns speak in prose. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the Athenians speak in iambic pentameters and the clowns speak in prose. When the clowns put on a play for the Athenians, the clowns and the Athenians swap speaking styles, so the Athenians make snarky comments in prose (just like a badly behaved audience) on the badly rhymed acting of the clowns. The fairies, meanwhile, speak in trochaic verse, so their king and queen sound stylistically different from their Athenian equivalents, almost like Shakespeare has given them a foreign accent. When two characters are arguing, the ten syllables of a normal line are sometimes split between them to emphasize the back and forth nature. If a character is flustered or annoyed, their lines may be obviously different from the 10 syllable norm, again to emphasize their mood.
For actors learning their lines, the syllable counts almost act as stage direction hints: if they aren't 10 syllables, then some mood or other needs to be taken into account.
It means someone I know irl clocked my Hackernews account because how I write on here closely corresponds with how I actually speak. Which is—okay, yeah, guilty as charged I guess. Must've been all that IRC in the 90s.
It would be easy if all you had to do was make it simpler, but I don't think that's it. Good writers always sound like themselves, you're reading along and you feel like there's a whole person there saying something to you, it's really them and not anyone else. It's magic.
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.
I don't agree that one should "write like they talk." Certain forms of writing are fundamentally a higher and more complex register of language, because they have gone through more rounds of refinement and editing, while speech is generally composed one-shot; you can't "go backwards" and make edits to your speech, except by going forwards and issuing more speech to make corrections and amendments to what you've already said. That is, speech is "write once," given the fact that it needs to be composed extemporaneously.
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.
Being a mediocre writer, I don't know what it means to write like you talk, but I know I've noticed a strong correlation between how ornate one's language is and how little one knows what they're talking about. The people who know the most use the simplest words, and if someone uses complicated language, they're either trying to deceive or to hide the weaknesses of their argument.
This only goes for specific cases, of course. E.g. it probably applies more to business language than to novels.
I cannot agree with this after reading transcripts of Trump's speeches. It does make sense in some scenarios, but writing like one speaks only works for people who speak clearly and effectively; unfortunately most people are terrible communicators.
Maybe more an effective rhetorician than communicator. I suppose his communication does match the clarity of thought though... it's just that the thoughts are so jumbled he says 3 things that contradict each other in the same breath.
the point of rhetoric is persuasion or flattery, the point of communication (or argument as its usually framed going all the way back to Plato) is to accurately convey an idea or concept. In your average Trump speech the point is usually to evoke an emotion in his audience, not so much arguing anything in particular.
> I hate how he talks, but he seems to be an effective communicator if you only judge by results
Looking at Iran situation, absolutely not, results of Trumps communications are pure disaster. Looking at tariffs situation, absolutely not, results of Trumps communications are pure disaster. His communication is masterpiece of ineffective communication.
On the plus side, he is emotionally pleasing to certain kind of people and he is effective in bullying and humiliating close ones. If those are the goal, yes he is effective. But, he cant do much else.
I never know what I am going to say or write, but writing is convienient by way of bieng deleetable.
I do like words, and sounds, a lot, and am interested in non verbal comunication, especialy in other species, which requires a huge suspension of judgement concerning what
constitutes meaning, and how much of it we radiate, cluelessly
this last, is the part that the poetry of shared experience can conviegh by way of the written word, sometimes, and for those in the frame of mind to see around the corner and into there own inner world.
Most of the time when people say they 'write like they talk' it's to excuse putting filler words and fluff in their writing to try to squeeze some cheap 'authenticity' instead of focusing on clear simple sentences.
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.
How I write is better than how I talk, because by definition I have more time to think. So I aim for the opposite - I aim to spontaneously talk the way I write.
And academic and technical writing should absolutely be lexically dense. It's not poetry, you're trying to express information as efficiently as possible.
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.
As a non-native English speaker, it sometimes takes me some time to write things because I am trying to put my thoughts in a concise yet simple-to-understand form.
> 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.
If he’s not, his writing indicates a native level of fluency.
There are absolutely native English speakers who write like this. Some of them even get degrees studying the language.
> haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
I’m a native English speaker and I have no idea what “take a butchers” means, so possibly not the best example. I assume this is a Britishism.
You're right. More specifically it's Cockney (east end of London) rhyming slang. Basic rule: find a phrase that rhymes with the word you mean, substitute the phrase, but leave out the rhyming word. So "butcher's" = "butcher's hook" = "look". So "take a butcher's" means "take a look".
I had a Cockney father-in-law, once upon a time, so a few phrases crept into my lexicon. I still use "don't chicken about it" = "chicken curry" = "worry", and a couple more.
You don't always leave out a word. Some of the more famous ones, that most English people have heard, are "trouble and strife" = "wife", and "apples and pears" = "stairs" - though I never heard anyone use those particular examples in regular speech, they're often given as examples / stereotypes / satires of the style.
> a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Yes, both Americans and Brits write overly verbose prose.
> Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is.
Plenty of true English speakers are educated enough to know what 'past participle' is. Like common. Just like plenty of native Germans can consciously analyze cases.
America is full of people that know what the 'past participle' is. Isn't it another country, like 'Africa' is a country, according to a worrying amount of Americans?
Shew, if I wrote like I talked to other people it would be an entertaining disaster. When you speak, you're speaking to your specific audience, which could be your boss, your toddler, your spouse, your friend of 25 years, your in-laws, your candor in giving a presentation, this list goes on.
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.
Tangentially, this post has stuck with me for years: "How Real Life is Different from Fiction part 2" https://mengwong.livejournal.com/7227.html
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.
Interestingly and coincidentally, I was reading an old thread from 2015 titled "Write like you talk" written by Paul Graham.
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
A few decades back when I was a PhD student a British university I taught an undergraduate class and I noticed that the quality of writing in their examination papers and projects was clunky and awkward, in contrast to the admirable, free-flowing, everyday style the way they wrote (as they spoke) on their student bulletin boards. I used to wonder why they didn't write like this in their classwork.
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".
Young academics try to signal that they know what they’re doing so they end up cargo-culting dense technical writing that they can’t yield well and just end up with bad writing.
It takes a lot of confidence to write academic material in a natural conversational tone because they’ve internalized a rule that says “if it’s easy to understand, I won’t come off as smart enough to belong”.
Confidence and support.
I wrote my 45 pages PhD thesis (physics) in a more conversational tone, using "I" and skipping the introduction (half a page to say that if you need an introduction it is better to read this and that, instead of poorly copied pasted text here).
I got a 5:2 acceptance from the jury (which is extremely rare, normally this is 7:0), with the two saying that the content is very good, but I am desacralizing science... I told them that I am proud of these two rejections there and my wonderful thesis director (truly a fantastic person) jumped in to avoid some brawl :)
The sociologist Bourdieu has written about social capital and the impact of the ductus people aquire. Simplified this is why rich people of old money do not respect the new rich: Sure they have the money, but they do not have the taste, the manierisms, the language, etc. Being part of that part of society is more than just having money.
These details are a more important mechanism for social groups to differenciate themselves with than most people consciously realise in their day to day lives. Yet we constantly decide by minor details that someone does or does not belong to a group. Maybe a steelworker will notice by the way you talk that you never worked in manual labor even if you dress the part.
Most people tend to have multiple such learned manierisms, meaning you will walk, sit, talk differently with your male friends than in an academic setting or with your family for example.
So when young students enter university they undergo a massive adjustment phase where they relate their existing manierisms to the new manierisms they encounter. This is all in order to become and stay part of the group. There is of course a perception how one "is supposed to" write in academia and students try to emulate this to the best of their ability, which may or may not yield good results. Eventually they find their own academic language and aquired tastes.
Something to add to your brain's STEERING.md file then.
What I've always interpreted this advice as as is to read out loud what I write and then eliminate the parts that sound weird or like a robot.
Source: Writing for more than half my life and HN has liked some of my articles in the past
My current best way to write is to just write everything that amuses me, then go back and edit out the tangents, and then usually reverse the order of the paragraphs.
Interesting, why reverse?
When news was transmitted by flaky telegraph systems, the first paragraph evolved to be a concise version. The ensuing paragraphs provided layers of detail. If the connection was lost, whatever got through would stand as enough. That is more or less how I write emails for work. The other thing is, tell em what you’re going to say, then say it, then tell em what you told them.
This. Sometimes during hectic times, my bosses need to get the right summary of everything in one phone screen. So I generally try to have mails with a first line summarizing everything in one glance, a short section you can read in an elevator ride, and then everything else.
For example, during Log4Shell, our Group Director of Operations was helping Support and Account Management with scared customers and was just bouncing customer meeting to meeting. Hence, line one of the mail was "Rollout of mitigation 1 to applications estimated by 12:13; delays expected at only internally reachable middleware". After that, a 3-4 sentence paragraph with more details and then a longer explanation in detail, ideally with keywords highlighted and such. Those would be discussed in some peace later on.
A common suggestion is to put the bottom line on the top line. Consider all the articles posted even here that make the reader suffer through the writer's own thinking process before getting to the point.
> A common suggestion is to put the bottom line on the top line.
BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front — e.g., https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-pre...
I don’t know. When I jam out a comment I seem to summarize at the end when I’m done, and then I reread quickly and see the summary made a weird conclusion but was a fine introduction.
what?
I always understood it as advice for school children who don't know how to express themselves in writing and end up with a blank page. You are encouraged to imagine you're talking to someone to overcome the hurdle of translating thoughts into words.
Along similar lines, in elementary school we were taught the introduction/body/conclusion pattern to help organize our thoughts in essays, but actually using those words as headers makes you sound like a child. "Conclusion" is especially common. It just reads like you're blindly following that pattern and don't actually know how to tie your thoughts together.
I remember editing my then girlfriend’s (now wife) papers in university, when she was struggling to explain something succinctly. I’d ask her: well what are you trying to say? And she would explain it to me, clear as day. “Just write that.”
This is how I write
I literally use my iphone voice to text to transcribe, then go back and edit.
It’s surprising that more people aren’t doing it
I still can't figure out a non-awkward place to talk to a device to generate text.
Can't do it in public, can't do it in the office, talking to my phone at home feels weird.
That’s purely a you problem
So you can just start talking to your computer in a coffee house or middle of an open plan office
"So claude, let's get this feature started, ummm. Maybe we could, umm, get working on the backend first..."
And you don't feel the least bit awkward or silly?
I agree it feels silly, even though we look like we’re talking to ourselves when we’re on a phone call in front of others. It is bizarre.
If I saw someone doing that it wouldn’t feel any different to me as an outside observer than someone having a phone call
People have crazy phone conversations on BART or Caltrain all the time
I do however have no issue doing that basically anywhere I would otherwise have a phone call
Me personally? No I wouldn’t do that because it wouldn’t be comfortable to have a phone call in a coffee shop
I think most people don't like editing text on a phone. I hate it.
I’m trying to move more and more to my phone so I can walk around
I’d love a great voice IDE
Back in 94, when I first started using speech recognition (Dragon Dictate, word-at-a-time recognition) I had a curious experience. I could feel the difference between speaking spoken speech and speaking written speech. Now I've been using speech recognition for so long, I now swap back and forth relatively easily. This ability to switch how I speak comes in handy when writing dialogue or a speech.
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.
"Write like you want Grammarly to surprise you in a good way"
I learned the opposite lesson and ended up talking like I write.
This is largely where I'm ending up, but I started at the other end.
There is value in prose that carries your literal voice when the audience is _people who know you_. There is negative value in writing prose that requires the audience to _read it in your voice_ in order for it to make sense, avoid offense, or convey intent.
My prose changed first: it became plain spoken, as devoid of contextual subtlety as I could make it. My career benefitted. My spoken interactions followed.
The only thing that bothers me about it is the nagging sense that I've become so fucking boring.
I also started at the other end, in the sense that from an early age and for the rest of my life I have spent a lot more time chatting over text than with spoken word.
Perhaps there is beauty in 'negative value'. Art may have 'negative value' by that definition.
I would not argue with this, but I regret to confess that I am merely an engineer. I no longer aspire to artistry.
That's how you get flagged as an AI!
Arguing you should not write "complex" things or "formal" things becuase of poor attention spans just makes me sad about the state of literacy.
Unnecessary complex and formal writimg is just a poor writing. It is harder to write clearly and simply.
I mean it's advice from the same man who thought "delve" - a 6000 year old, monosyllabic word used by Shakespeare and Tolkien - was too complicated and should not be used.
I am not sure we should be taking him as a literary authority.
Language is a tool, you have to do what's best for your own goal.
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.
I prefer text (to audio or video) specifically because it can communicate complex ideas concisely, yet can be read at any speed.
This is what "write like you talk" looks like: https://yaky.dev/2026-04-01-ridiculous-reddit/reddit-601.jpg
I don't agree with this advice. Reading and Listening are different mediums and they have different strengths and weaknesses. When writing, one should take advantage of the written medium.
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 don't write like I talk, because my speech has a bunch of filler in it. Moreover I am often talking at the same time as forming an opinion. (ie trying to figure out why something is the way it is, by asking questions.)
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.
https://archive.ph/2026.04.09-025600/https://arjunpanicksser...
"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
Sorry, my attention started drifting when you said "epistolary."
"Attention is not what you need [to think]"
Unless, unless you're AI?
I also want people to read out loud like they talk. Many people assume a special reading voice that drones huskily with diminished tonal variation, and it's unpleasant to listen to.
One superpower I wish I had is the incredible summarizing into single sentences that you can see in the LLM web UIs when they automatically make a title for a discussion.
I wonder if there’s a way to train that ability.
If by "train" you mean "learn", it occurs to me you could try applying the "CAR story" interview technique of relating a story in 3 sentence (one each for the Challenge, Action and Result). Once you have it down to 3 sentences, distilling it into one, or producing a title, should become doable. HTH
> I wonder if there’s a way to train that ability.
I have to imagine it comes down to study and practice, just like everything else.
It’s a very good post — and I do agree with the main ideas. It’s pretty remarkable how good writers like Scott Alexander and others are able to consistently pump out good writing, especially when the key does seem to always comes down to clarity (and mostly revision for me). Maybe reps are able to give that over time, but even with getting older and now being able to bounce ideas off LLMs == it still takes me so many iterations before I feel like my prose / ideas / outlines are worth sharing.
I would like to see them include some analysis of the first recorded audio conversations such as on wax cylinders or the 1930s WPA/Federal Writers’ Project. Was sentence complexity the same as it is now?
The focus on clarity of thought is a modern shift, or at least the "modern preference". Hemingway was a big proponent on short, direct sentences and few or no adjectives.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, complex sentence structure signaled intelligence for both the author and reader. It was a form of entertainment, in a way, when books were few and nights were long. Try reading Henry James for an idea about what this looked like in practice. Shakespeare is another obvious example of "heightened language" besides archaic words the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise).
> the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise)
(Iambic pentameters are 10-syllable lines with alternate syllables unstressed and stressed, like "if MUSic BE the FOOD of LOVE ...", the so-called heartbeat rhythm)
Shakespeare actually used a variety of different styles to demarcate different characters, moods, etc. As a very rough rule-of-thumb in Shakespeare, posh characters speak in iambic pentameters, commoners and clowns speak in prose. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the Athenians speak in iambic pentameters and the clowns speak in prose. When the clowns put on a play for the Athenians, the clowns and the Athenians swap speaking styles, so the Athenians make snarky comments in prose (just like a badly behaved audience) on the badly rhymed acting of the clowns. The fairies, meanwhile, speak in trochaic verse, so their king and queen sound stylistically different from their Athenian equivalents, almost like Shakespeare has given them a foreign accent. When two characters are arguing, the ten syllables of a normal line are sometimes split between them to emphasize the back and forth nature. If a character is flustered or annoyed, their lines may be obviously different from the 10 syllable norm, again to emphasize their mood.
For actors learning their lines, the syllable counts almost act as stage direction hints: if they aren't 10 syllables, then some mood or other needs to be taken into account.
to start with, I would say "write as you talk".
but the idea is dubious: writing/reading is a different transaction than speaking/listening.
The secret is to pre-write all your talking
Is this Nathan Fielder?
It means you turn on Voice Access on Windows or dictation on MacOS.
It means someone I know irl clocked my Hackernews account because how I write on here closely corresponds with how I actually speak. Which is—okay, yeah, guilty as charged I guess. Must've been all that IRC in the 90s.
It would be easy if all you had to do was make it simpler, but I don't think that's it. Good writers always sound like themselves, you're reading along and you feel like there's a whole person there saying something to you, it's really them and not anyone else. It's magic.
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.
Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski are good examples.
I don't agree that one should "write like they talk." Certain forms of writing are fundamentally a higher and more complex register of language, because they have gone through more rounds of refinement and editing, while speech is generally composed one-shot; you can't "go backwards" and make edits to your speech, except by going forwards and issuing more speech to make corrections and amendments to what you've already said. That is, speech is "write once," given the fact that it needs to be composed extemporaneously.
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.
(2025) Seems to be a link-post
Being a mediocre writer, I don't know what it means to write like you talk, but I know I've noticed a strong correlation between how ornate one's language is and how little one knows what they're talking about. The people who know the most use the simplest words, and if someone uses complicated language, they're either trying to deceive or to hide the weaknesses of their argument.
This only goes for specific cases, of course. E.g. it probably applies more to business language than to novels.
I cannot agree with this after reading transcripts of Trump's speeches. It does make sense in some scenarios, but writing like one speaks only works for people who speak clearly and effectively; unfortunately most people are terrible communicators.
What do you mean? He has a rabid fan base who loves him because he writes like he talks!
It clearly works for him - I hate how he talks, but he seems to be an effective communicator if you only judge by results. Sadly.
Maybe more an effective rhetorician than communicator. I suppose his communication does match the clarity of thought though... it's just that the thoughts are so jumbled he says 3 things that contradict each other in the same breath.
> more an effective rhetorician than communicator.
What’s the difference?
the point of rhetoric is persuasion or flattery, the point of communication (or argument as its usually framed going all the way back to Plato) is to accurately convey an idea or concept. In your average Trump speech the point is usually to evoke an emotion in his audience, not so much arguing anything in particular.
"write like you talk" is advice for type-1 thinkers.
presumably also advice from them.
> I hate how he talks, but he seems to be an effective communicator if you only judge by results
Looking at Iran situation, absolutely not, results of Trumps communications are pure disaster. Looking at tariffs situation, absolutely not, results of Trumps communications are pure disaster. His communication is masterpiece of ineffective communication.
On the plus side, he is emotionally pleasing to certain kind of people and he is effective in bullying and humiliating close ones. If those are the goal, yes he is effective. But, he cant do much else.
I never know what I am going to say or write, but writing is convienient by way of bieng deleetable. I do like words, and sounds, a lot, and am interested in non verbal comunication, especialy in other species, which requires a huge suspension of judgement concerning what constitutes meaning, and how much of it we radiate, cluelessly this last, is the part that the poetry of shared experience can conviegh by way of the written word, sometimes, and for those in the frame of mind to see around the corner and into there own inner world.
Most of the time when people say they 'write like they talk' it's to excuse putting filler words and fluff in their writing to try to squeeze some cheap 'authenticity' instead of focusing on clear simple sentences.
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.
Reminds me of that outburst by Harrison Ford on the set of one of the Star Wars... complaining to George Lucas about the writing:
"George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!"
How I write is better than how I talk, because by definition I have more time to think. So I aim for the opposite - I aim to spontaneously talk the way I write.
And academic and technical writing should absolutely be lexically dense. It's not poetry, you're trying to express information as efficiently as possible.
Just write!
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.
As a non-native English speaker, it sometimes takes me some time to write things because I am trying to put my thoughts in a concise yet simple-to-understand form.
> 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.
If he’s not, his writing indicates a native level of fluency.
There are absolutely native English speakers who write like this. Some of them even get degrees studying the language.
> haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
I’m a native English speaker and I have no idea what “take a butchers” means, so possibly not the best example. I assume this is a Britishism.
You're right. More specifically it's Cockney (east end of London) rhyming slang. Basic rule: find a phrase that rhymes with the word you mean, substitute the phrase, but leave out the rhyming word. So "butcher's" = "butcher's hook" = "look". So "take a butcher's" means "take a look".
I had a Cockney father-in-law, once upon a time, so a few phrases crept into my lexicon. I still use "don't chicken about it" = "chicken curry" = "worry", and a couple more.
You don't always leave out a word. Some of the more famous ones, that most English people have heard, are "trouble and strife" = "wife", and "apples and pears" = "stairs" - though I never heard anyone use those particular examples in regular speech, they're often given as examples / stereotypes / satires of the style.
> a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Yes, both Americans and Brits write overly verbose prose.
> Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is.
Plenty of true English speakers are educated enough to know what 'past participle' is. Like common. Just like plenty of native Germans can consciously analyze cases.
America is full of people that know what the 'past participle' is. Isn't it another country, like 'Africa' is a country, according to a worrying amount of Americans?
Shew, if I wrote like I talked to other people it would be an entertaining disaster. When you speak, you're speaking to your specific audience, which could be your boss, your toddler, your spouse, your friend of 25 years, your in-laws, your candor in giving a presentation, this list goes on.
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.