Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Write like you talk

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 282 posts

Re: Write like you talk

#171

Post by gbog »

"And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend."

Well no, it is very hard to write a text in "spoken language". This has been analysed by many writers, and the master of this operation in French language is Céline. He says that a lot of minute tweaking is required in order to produce the effect of spoken language in the reader's mind.

And this has not very much to do with removing the "litterature" from one's script, which is obviously much easier.

Re: Write like you talk

#172

Post by hugh4 »

aWidebrant wrote: post #54

"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…

>(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

If it is possible to cut a word, always cut it.

If possible to cut a word, cut it.

If possible, cut.

But of course "if possible" is implied, he wouldn't be advising you to do anything impossible, so just:

Cut.

Re: Write like you talk

#173

Post by pjscott »

baoha wrote: post #162

It's good that PG didn't follow his own rule, otherwise we would have seen lots of "hmm" in his texts.

Sounds like you've heard him talk, then. Listen to where he says "umm", and the tone, and how the audience reacts: those are punctuation. In writing they become paragraph breaks or dashes or periods or commas or just strongly implied pauses after emphasized words.

It's an unusual way of punctuating things, but it seems to work okay.

Re: Write like you talk

#174

Post by amk_ »

pedalpete wrote: post #40

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 wr…

The linked documentation bounces between using 'I' and 'you' as subjects for examples. Get rid of the references to yourself in the docs -- the documentation should be neutral. Take the reader's perspective if a subject is required. In day to day business like setting development priorities or responding to issues on Github, you can use 'I'.

Re: Write like you talk

#175

Post by haraball »

idlewords wrote: post #4

If you're interested in becoming a better non-fiction writer, I can't over-recommend William Zinsser's "On Writing Well".

The only downside from reading and learning from this book is that you suddenly discover how much bad writing there is out there. ;)

Re: Write like you talk

#176

Post by joonoro »

I've heard of this advice before [0] and I really think it's very useful advice. The goal isn't to make your writing literally spoken language and add every "um" and "ah" to your text, but to make it sound like someone might actually say that and that it sounds like natural speech. Like pg said, you wouldn't look at your friends weirdly for that. It's too easy to fall into the trap of trying to "decorate" your text with fancy words and language but as the example shows it feels artificial and alienates the reader. "Write like you talk."

[0] I think it was The Elements of Style, but you should go read that anyways because it's like K&R for English. There's a lot of examples of how the ear is much better at deciding which kind of language to use than you are.

Re: Write like you talk

#177

Post by incepted »

> Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language.

Speaking of doing what you preach: stop adding manual
in your articles, it makes them unreadable on mobile and wide monitors and it basically displays a total ignorance of how the web is supposed to work (let readers control how your articles appear to them).

Re: Write like you talk

#178

Post by chirau »

flashman wrote: post #41
stupidcar wrote: post #38

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…

This is a very good point, because when you're talking, like you'd talk to another person I mean, your turn at speaking generally flows into a single large sentence, which is typical turn-taking behaviour, because in a conversation the other person is always looking for cues that it's their turn to speak, and so you ah have to keep going even if it means you've wandered away from your original point.

I see what you did there, you wrote how you talk :)

Re: Write like you talk

#179

Post by incepted »

More useful would be "talk like you write".

The best speakers are the ones who are best at that because of the mental discipline it imposes: no uh, er, ah or pauses, just grammatically correct sentences, all the time.

Re: Write like you talk

#180

Post by visarga »

gh02t wrote: post #96
stupidcar wrote: post #38

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…

Indeed, "write like you talk" is not quite the right way to go about it. In my experience that usually leads to a stream-of-consciousness mess. 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…

> read what you have written OUT LOUD

I use Text to Speech to listen to all my posts before I submit them. I also use TTS and read at the same time to improve my attention. TTS imposes a constant pace and makes the message more pregnant.

Post reply on HN