"The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira, all is decadence." "
Actually I could imagine Neil Oliver would say something like this in one of his documentaries.
Write Like You Talk (2015)
11–20 of 152 posts
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#12Writing and speaking are such different media – for example, you can go back and reread a sentence, but you can't wind back time in a live conversation; you can signal how something should be interpreted,* give parsing hints, and add emotion using inflection and tone while speaking, but you can't do this in writing. So I think we should expect good writing to look different than good speaking.
PG might have in mind then the strange affectations that seem to grip people sometimes when they write, but I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.
*sarcasm, e.g.
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#13Whey if a wrert like a taa'ked, a divn't think anyone would kna what a wa' gaan an aboot...
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#14I like a lot of what Graham writes, but I fundamentally disagree with him on this one. Spoken language is the JIT compiler of information transferral. It’s spur-of-the-moment; it’s stream-of-consciousness; it gets the job done by stripping away a lot of nuance and complexity. Written language is more subtle, more considered, more edited - he states himself that he writes then edits - in his case to make it more “spok…
I’ve outgrown a few bloggers. Spolsky still stings a bit. I really liked his early stuff and then my frowns got bigger and a lot more frequent.
The problem I found with blogging is that I only have about two year’s of things to say, and either I start scraping the bottom of the barrel or I had to take a long break and then circle back, reiterating 80% of what I already said but with new or better examples. If I was forced to have an audience for ten years I’d just be saying crazy shit all the time.
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#15This is good advice if we ignore the headline completely.
If you want to see what I mean, record yourself talking sometime, a few minutes is fine. Make a transcript, and read that. Ideally, if there's someone around who can do the favor, have that someone edit the errors in transcription and punctuation first, so that part isn't conflated.
It's not going to look anything like good conversational writing.
The flip side is that someone setting out to "write like they speak" will instead succeed in writing in a conversational style, if anything. When that's good is another question.
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#16I see some people on HN, presumably Americans, start sentences with 'Like,...'
I find it annoying and it dims my view of the poster.
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#17I like a lot of what Graham writes, but I fundamentally disagree with him on this one. Spoken language is the JIT compiler of information transferral. It’s spur-of-the-moment; it’s stream-of-consciousness; it gets the job done by stripping away a lot of nuance and complexity. Written language is more subtle, more considered, more edited - he states himself that he writes then edits - in his case to make it more “spok…
I’ve outgrown a few bloggers. Spolsky still stings a bit. I really liked his early stuff and then my frowns got bigger and a lot more frequent. The problem I found with blogging is that I only have about two year’s of things to say, and either I start scraping the bottom of the barrel or I had to take a long break and then circle back, reiterating 80% of what I already said but with new or better examples. If I was f…
> If I was forced to have an audience for ten years I’d just be saying crazy shit all the time.
There is an alternative. Just blog without an audience. Don't keep any web server logs (or don't look at them). Delete the analytics.
The fact that someone theoretically could be reading my blog is enough motivation to write something understandable (rather than just scrawling some gibberish in a notebook), but whether that audience actually exists or not doesn't matter to me.
There's no inherent need to write regularly if you feel you have nothing new to say, is there?
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#18Writing and speaking are such different media – for example, you can go back and reread a sentence, but you can't wind back time in a live conversation; you can signal how something should be interpreted,* give parsing hints, and add emotion using inflection and tone while speaking, but you can't do this in writing. So I think we should expect good writing to look different than good speaking. PG might have in mind t…
It's not, I think, quite what you mean, but when you refer to "strange affectations" of writers (nicely put) I was reminded of this:
"Words resemble fish in that some specialist ones can survive only in a kind of reef, where their curious shapes and usages are protected from the hurly-burly of the open sea. ‘Rumpus’ and ‘fracas’ are found only in certain newspapers (in much the same way that ‘beverages’ are found only in certain menus). They are never used in normal conversation." - Terry Pratchett, 'The Truth'
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#19The most successful writers in the world do not do this, and many who do are not successful. Writing has to be much more precise than speech. Speech has tone, cadence, and body language. Writing does not, so you need to be articulate to get the the desired message and intent across and most importantly avoid confusion. And it has to be interesting enough for the reader to hopefully not give up too soon. This is much harder than speech.
Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)
#20> But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are. Disagree. When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences. It's also much easier to express a cohesive, complex thought this way compared to a meandering, directionless sentence. And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly con…
Agree. Fancy' words can add flavor to the writing and help avoid repetition, and also are more precise. If you are writing warning labels or instructions, then maybe simpler is better. But otherwise, I don't think it is a problem..