What's wrong with "mercurial Spaniard"?
Write like you talk
121–130 of 282 posts
Re: Write like you talk
#122when i first read Saramago [1], i was impressed how he wrote with no punctuation or even capital letters, and how enjoyable and easy to read it was, it was definitely a breath of fresh air, only a few times it was hard to follow the story, mainly on dialogues i sometimes got lost who was saying what, overall his writing style made reading his novels a lot of fun, my feeling was more like listening to someone tell me a story directly, rather than having to get hold of the rhythm and style of the writer.
Re: Write like you talk
#123"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…
Orwell wrote important and influential books but his actual writing was quite pedestrian - much more like a good journalist than a great literary stylist.
Thackeray, on the other hand, broke all of those rules (except perhaps the last) in almost every sentence in "Vanity Fair", and yet I know which I find the more pleasurable to read. I've also never put much stock in this notion of the evils of the passive voice - which thing Orwell himself seemingly struggled greatly to avoid.
Re: Write like you talk
#124If 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…
It's funny you mention this, because pg himself has a bunch of filler words when he speaks. See random video of him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lcp0uZsY7k.
Re: Write like you talk
#125On the contrary, I write because I don't talk so well. When I try to explain an idea in person, it usually comes out jumbled and half-formed. In contrast, when I sit down to write it out, it becomes much more clear on both sides of the conversation, even if it sounds a bit robotic.
Many people I know are exceptionally good at talking precisely and at length about their interests. Sometimes I envy them. I've always wished I could spin out my thoughts at their speed. But I don't really think in sentences. Many of my ideas exist in a sort of impressionistic cloud that takes a lot of energy to translate into conversation. In that sense, writing is as much a form of physical thought as it is a tool of idea dissemenation.
Nonetheless, it's an interesting exercise to record a first draft of a long essay into a microphone and mine it for intersting bits of prose. I should really try it more often!
Re: Write like you talk
#126If 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…
> If you've ever read a verbatim transcript of an interview or conversation, you'll know that actual speech is anything but clear When I go to conferences and sit in the audience, I type transcripts in real-time. I somewhat agree with you, but I have some other evidence that I don't know what to do with: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/ I have found that some people are amazingly well spoken. Absurdly well spoken,…
Other replies mention the atypical preparedness of presentation text; but I have noticed what you describe in normal life, in normal conversation: some people do indeed seem to speak as if they'd had a chance to revise the sentences / paragraphs in advance. Is it that they care more, and a lifetime's practice has resulted in that kind of automatic organization?
Re: Write like you talk
#127Most 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.
HN really jumps the shark best when it swaps definition of words to support whatever it wants to support. Hemingway's writing style was far from being convoluted.
Who said Hemingway was convoluted? Certainly not me.
Re: Write like you talk
#128Most 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.
> Don't use abbreviations, long words we may not know, pretending to be Hemingway. You keep using that name, but I don't think you have read any of his works.
I keep using that name? I think that's the first time I've done that in decades.
Re: Write like you talk
#129Rather than taking writing advice from a programmer/venture capitalist, I recommend Steering the Craft, by Ursula Le Guin, which will help ground any writing you might do in solid understanding of the "tools" you have available as a writer-- pace, grammar, the sound of words, and so forth
pg was a published technical writer and widely read essayist before Y Combinator.
which is perhaps why he can "write as he talks", and get away with it. He honed his craft. I work with a few programmers who write exactly as they talk, and it is littered with misplaced, dangling modifiers, and misspellings of things like "bury the lead" vs "bury the lede". The overall structure of arguments is haphazard too. Writing is hard, and I think the best way to get better is to write things that you _want_ to get taken more seriously than just as if you were talking.
Re: Write like you talk
#130Here's a transcript of a Paul Graham speech.
http://genius.com/Paul-graham-lecture-3-counterintuitive-par...
So yeah, it's conversational in that he uses words like "noob" and "dude" and "bullshit". And yes, Google finds examples of his written works that use these words too.
But not everyone talks like Paul; perhaps Neil Oliver says things like "mercurial Spaniard" when he talks. It's kind of a nice feature of language that different people can use words differently. I'd rather Paul's examples were more of the corporate anti-speak variety like "maximizing synergies" and the like.