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Seth Godin said something really similar, and I've drawn on it during periods of writer's block many times: >No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down. Why then, is writer's block endemic? The reason we don't get talker's block is…
Most of the comments, here, are taking the statement too literally. What he means is to write sentences in a way you would in normal conversation and not try to be a writer of linguistic elocution. Don't use abbreviations, long words we may not know, pretending to be Hemingway. Too many pretend to be Hemingway when they should write like Brian Kernighan at least.
You keep using that name, but I don't think you have read any of his works.
This 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…
Exactly, formality can be part of the message, and sometimes less is a bore . There is certainly a place for more formal language at times, if only to communicate intent and add a bit of pepper to the writing. For example Will Self would not be Will Self without using ten words where one would do, nor would Poe or Henry James (who I suspect spoke much as he wrote). I think what pg is objecting to here though is proba…
"Write like you talk" is bad advice twice: It encourages rambling, which - unlike in a conversation - the reader has no means to interrupt, and it offers no clear rules to follow while writing. Orwell's six[1] are, in my experience, much more useful: (i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is p…
Here's where I think pg is coming from: 1) you are going to be writing about something you know 2) you are going to be writing to "people like you" 3) you are going to be read by, maybe as a product of 1 and 2, people at your order of expertise. Given these qualifications, it's always best to write in a conversational tone using words you would normally use. With that in mind, going through your points: (i) most peop…
Where did you get that from? Passive voice is extremely common in conversations.
"He was acquitted of robbery" (passive) is probably more common than "The jury acquitted him of robbery" (active). "I was born in 1973" (passive) is much more common than "My mother gave birth to me in 1973" (active). "The X-Files was cancelled in 2002" (passive) vs. "Fox management cancelled the X-Files in 2002" (active). Even very colloquial phrases like, "The Cubs got wrecked in that series." Etc.
[Edit to expand/clarify examples.]
"Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas" The irony in this sentence from the article is breathtaking.
Do you mean because it's a great sentence in the context of this essay (maybe the best one in it), but you judge that you couldn't get away with saying it verbatim in conversation? (If you were explaining the idea in this essay?) Or please explain.
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 th…
However, one thing I have found almost universally helps my students is similar: read what you have written OUT LOUD. Is it halting and hard to read? Confusing and obtuse? Then you should probably fix it. There seems to be some magic about actually speaking the words out loud (as opposed to just reading it like normal editing) that helps a lot of people figure out when a piece of writing is bad.
This is good advice, but I disagree with his example. The entire paragraph reads[0]: >The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists' shoulders — giants' shoulders — that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: 'After Altamira, all…
> it will always be rightly described as primitive.
> . But it is upon those anonymous artists' shoulders — giants' shoulders — that
He starts a sentence with But and puts dashes in for pause effects. Does he go a bit purply in his prose towards the end? Sure. I think that is the difference between writing and conversation though. You can write well, explain your points and have a simple flow using the a comfortable tone. e.g. not forcing absurd 10cent works into your works and being unnecessarily complex. However, you can use a sentence structure like:
> The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: 'After Altamira, all is decadence.'
For dramatic effect. Author departs from his clean flow to qoute somebody who speaks differently than himself. And it looks like the mercurial spanaird talks funny which is underscored by the authors' change in tone.
Funny, I just wrote "The Out-Loud-To-Your-Friend-Constraint For Writing" -- http://expost.padm.us/outloud (It's kind of self-indulgent musing on the idea of constraints for writing.) And for customer support we call this the BFF Heuristic -- http://blog.beeminder.com/curtain Excerpt: "If you read what you've written to a user out loud and it's possible to tell that it's not being spoken to your best friend, rewrite i…
I really like the idea of the BFF heuristic, but I also think people should try to read writing, especially emails, as though they are coming from a BFF too! I've seen time after time where a friend reads an email, and each time they reread it theh get more angry, but when I look at it there's no offense to be found. If you have a negative opinion of somebody its easy to read everything theh write as a personal attack
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 th…
> brains seem to edit I'd love to hear from NLP experts on speech vs writing from a machine's perspective. > not a representation of natural communication so much as an idealised version Written language lacks stresses and intonation. I wonder if the written dialect attempts to fill in this gap, and whether tonal languages idealize their speech differently. > conversational tone can improve formal writing about compl…
But spoken language about technical topics and difficult ideas tends to also be disfluent.
For a long time computational linguists were using algorithms that performed okay on written language but poorly on spoken language. Specifically, they used algorithms that weren't linear-time in the length of the input. This meant that the input had to be pre-segmented, so you had to run another model before the parser, and then accept the errors from the previous model.
Now that we've got linear-time algorithms that are doing everything jointly, it's not so bad. We just need to get a bit better at using intonation features, and parsing lattice input so that we can deal with the recognition errors.
Mostly, it's a relief not to have to deal with the really tortured language often found in journalese. News reports are written really weirdly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, simplifying would be great. You do realize, however, that a large part of the legal profession is to intentionally write broadly, imprecisely, and flexibly to avoid traps. Other kinds of legal writing are intentionally precise in some clauses so as to add complexity to deliberately avoid immediate comprehension.
In the manner of discourse such as you have exemplified with your comments under your current pseudonym, it is difficult to ascertain your intended trop, voice, or topic. Thus, I hereby request that you rephrase in a more course or colloquial or blunt manner.
If you want more blunt - I speak multiple languages at native or near native level, including two since birth. Spoken English, especially by your average American is rarely to the point, clear, and pleasant. Don't write like you speak, because the average person sucks at it. Instead, know your subject and audience and write to them. Avoid overgeneralizing because it's easy to make an ass of yourself like PG.
Regarding legalese, it is hard to understand and that is intentional. Could it be any clearer for you or will you down-vote again?