The hardest thing about communication is clarity.
Yes. Clarity can creep up on you, and before you know it people can find your mistakes.
Write like you talk
21–30 of 282 posts
Re: Write like you talk
#22To the contrary, I explicitly do not write the way I talk; they are very different mediums! Each is better suited to communicate different things / emotions.
Writing gives me the freedom to edit, iterate and polish; something speech cannot do.
I love both writing and speech/presenting - do not be reductionist and reduce writing to mere "written conversation".
Re: Write like you talk
#23If you can't say "mercurial Spaniard" to your friends, get new friends.
I find that if I need to use a word like mercurial it helps to add a four-letter word in proximity. It seems to aid digestion and thus cuts down on the commentary.
Re: Write like you talk
#24This is fairly popular advice, and I heard it at least a half dozen times at my (liberal arts) college. That's not to dismiss this post because its takeaway is commonplace: I agree with the sentiment. However, I think it's important to embrace the full implication of its thesis: Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas. Athletic clothing is comfortable, it is functional, and it traffics in convenience. But…
I remember reading one of Isaac Isimov's biographies, where he mentions that one of the critiques of his writing is that it is too simple. His response -- that's the way it is supposed to be!
Re: Write like you talk
#25I like this sort of conversational writing style and it's my preferred style as well. But it's not actually much like natural speech. Anyone who's tried transcribing a recording of a conversation knows that they need to be cleaned up quite a lot to be readable. We don't actually talk in essay format.
Writing this way takes practice and probably a lot of reading as well to understand what you can get away with. People don't start out just knowing how to do it. Many people's native dialects are pretty far away from this style, so "write like you talk" wouldn't have the same results for them.
Re: Write like you talk
#26The thing keeping me from agreeing with this is a qualifier. If it were "write like you talk when writing a X", where X could be substituted by tutorial, essay, lesson, etc. I think I'd be more inclined not to disagree here. But as it stands "write like you talk" cannot hold true across the board for the set of all writing goals that exists.
For example just watch any Tarantino film (or read the scripts), none of those characters talk like Tarantino does, I really would not want to watch a film where Uma Thurman walks around talking like him either.
Entire fields of writing would not exists if this statement were true: Poetry, Rap, Music, Marketing slogans ("Think Different"), many types of Comedy, etc.
EDIT: After a reread it looks he does suggest a qualifier, which is basically the general use case, which appears to be when "you want people to read and understand what you write" ie. informative essays, tutorials, emails that would occur in normal or every day communication situations, in which case I would agree.
Re: Write like you talk
#27I had to look up "abstruse". I understood it's meaning from context, but wasn't sure if it was a portmanteau of abstract and obtuse, or an actual word. I've honestly never heard it in my life, and wouldn't stop someone saying it in a sentence, but it did stop my reading.
That made me wonder, does the fact that you sometimes have to listen to the spoken word over-estimate the impact the same words will have when written?
Re: Write like you talk
#28This x 10 for legal documents.
Simplify them please.
Re: Write like you talk
#29I think there is absolutely a place and time for writing the way you talk and that the same goes for writing formally.
The discussion of when and where for either case is a topic in and of itself.
Re: Write like you talk
#30>Thanks to Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.
Did she read drafts without contributing to them?