191–200 of 282 posts
On the other hand, if you're writing nonfiction, with the goal of conveying information effectively, then this is probably good advice.
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…
> 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,…
https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home?language=e...
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…
One of the best (and incidentally, very recent) illustration of your point was seen an AMA by Bill Murray [1]. The Reddit mod was simply transcribing sentences as Bill was saying them. Soon after, /u/BillMurrayTranslator (some random guy) rewrote the exact same content in a more coherent, punctuated and editorialized manner. The difference in readability is stark! Bill's answers were quite hard to understand because…
Apart from that, I did compare a few of the original answers from Bill Murray and with their translated versions, but I don't think the translator makes it clearer, he just added some punctuation and some context (pause, laughs, etc.).
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_...
Here'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 langu…
> 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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 - w…
I'm a big fan of Orwell, and yes he "wrote like a good journalist," since he was a journalist. Some people would say the world's best :) Gotta say, I haven't heard a whole lot of people championing the passive voice! If you have an idea to communicate, it strikes me as strange that you would want to leave out information - which is my biggest problem with the passive voice. "Is rumored to be" is a shifty way a writer…
I think the discussion on this article has been very good, actually, and I'm not sure phrases like "intellectual seriousness" really add much to the debate.
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…
> 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,…
And some experienced speakers will have their speaches written out and timed.
No shit sherlock anyone with half a fucking brain cell knows this