Write like you talk

This is exactly how I write. It works great. Except in college where English teachers mark down your paper for stupid reasons.

Many good, powerful speeches have repetition. Using the same word to end three sentences in a row. This can make for a great speech. It does not make for a good school grade. Oops.

PG is on to something here, which is that when most people try to make their prose better, they do it the wrong way. They make the language stilted, they add silly descriptions (such as "the mercurial Spaniard"). But, writing is different from speech, and you can learn techniques specifically to make your writing better. I highly recommend Steven Pinker's new book "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century" http://amzn.to/1LVI7eJ He has many concrete tips for improving your writing.

> If you're trying to convey an idea in hopes of transferring knowledge then yes -- write like you would talk to ease the others' cognitive load.

Even for transferring knowledge, it depends a lot on what knowledge you're trying to transfer, and to whom. In scientific writing, the more pop-science the goal of the article, the more conversational the style should be, and vice-versa. In a paper by someone in my field written for other people in the field, a pop-science conversational style isn't helpful, and would increase the cognitive load. In that case, I want clarity, precision, and accuracy, which is often helped by using a more specialized language.

This has been one of the main changes in science writing from earlier centuries. If you read 17th-century mathematics, it's actually trying to explain it all in a jargon-free conversational style, written as if you were having a parlor conversation about numbers. "Consider three whole numbers, such that the sum of the square of the first two equals the third", etc. This does not scale well and is error-prone.

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.

How about documentation? I was thinking about this the other day, as I was documenting an api, and I was writing as if I was speaking, explaining how I thought about the problem rather than just the end-point details.

How do people feel about this.

Here's an example, but I didn't push the updates I made yesterday. https://github.com/favor/it

When I wrote for the high school paper, people always commented on how my writing was as if I was just having an conversation with them, so I've always tried to write that way, but I'm not sure it works for all formats.