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Write Like You Talk (2015)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#81

Post by dctoedt »

GeneralMayhem wrote: post #58

How much of PG's blog is based on setting up strawmen and using them to bash on the liberal arts? > Even one sentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation. And yet people write whole books of it. These sentences immediately identify one big, relevant difference between speech and non-blog writing, which is not commented on in the blog post: people do not generally give book-length monologues on a single topic…

> How much of PG's blog is based on setting up strawmen and using them to bash on the liberal arts?

It'd be surprising if PG wanted to bash the liberal arts, given his longstanding interest in fine arts, specifically painting; see, e.g., his Hackers and Painters book. (He studied painting at RISD and in Florence.)

https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)

Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#82

Post by dctoedt »

chromatin wrote: post #48
mr_sturd wrote: post #13

Whey if a wrert like a taa'ked, a divn't think anyone would kna what a wa' gaan an aboot...

What an absurd and pathetic characterization of Southern Mountain Speech and/or rural American dialect. It comes across as speaking more to your character than your polemic target.

> Southern Mountain Speech and/or rural American dialect

Funny, I thought it was a phonetic transcription of Scottish dialect (whence are derived many Appalachian speech patterns, of course).

Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#84

Post by mediascreen »

c0mptonFP wrote: post #10
spacedcowboy wrote: post #2

I 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…

You hit the nail on the head, mostly. > then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed. Finding the right layer of abstraction is orthogonal to the write-speak axis. When speaking to my colleagues, I use technical jargon that no layman could understand. None of the topics are simple, or strongly abstracted. The issue of write vs. speak is more about the sentence structure, sentence length, and bre…

Slightly off topic: What's with HN and the word "orthogonal"?

I'm not a native English speaker, but I read a lot in English and it seems like the word is extremely common on HN compared to anywhere else.

Isn't usually "unrelated" a more descriptive and even a more precise word in most HN discussions? (The parent comment here does seem to make a point using axes, so maybe it is more appropriate here?)

Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#85

Post by rfrey »

civilized wrote: post #59
bcantrill wrote: post #38

As with so many things Paul Graham: there is a good, important idea here (omit needless words!) but he overshoots the mark, descending into venomous overgeneralizations. The truth is more nuanced: speaking and writing are both important vectors for communication (obviously?), but they are different (delightfully so!) -- with different strengths and weaknesses. Great writing is tight: it crackles. If a word serves tha…

> venomous overgeneralizations Sorry, but this illustrates Graham's point even better than the "mercurial Spaniard" thing. Reaching for a fancy word that doesn't quite make sense in context. Overgeneralizations could be absurd. They could even be dangerous, perhaps - although Graham's alleged overgeneralization really doesn't seem to be, even if wrong. They're not venomous, at least not without an argument. You can't…

>Sorry, but this illustrates Graham's point even better than the "mercurial Spaniard" thing

Funny, I thought it refuted Graham's point, very effectively.

Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#86

Post by secondcoming »

cole-k wrote: post #50
secondcoming wrote: post #16

I see some people on HN, presumably Americans, start sentences with 'Like,...' I find it annoying and it dims my view of the poster.

I would encourage you to try and push past this feeling. It's part of a natural change in dialect. There are instances of prejudice toward similar phenomena such as vocal fry or uptalk that have been shown to disproportionately be attributed to women, even though this is not the case. ( https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... some reading I found on the subject)

Like, nah, I probably won't.

Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#87

Post by coyotespike »

Easy recent counterexamples include, say, Hilary Mantel, Christopher Hitchens, David Foster Wallace, Helen Dewitt.

Each of these wrote brilliantly, in a style very different to how most people talk. Some of them (Hitchens) wrote deliberately in a "high style," successfully and delightfully. Others are, well, simply themselves - Mantel once noted, "You simply cannot run remedial classes for people on the page."

The plain style often misses the joy of language deployed for its own sake, for play. It can be well done, but it's certainly not the only legitimate style.

I will concede that for most people, writing for most practical purposes, the Strunk & White school which Graham is channelling is probably pretty good advice.

Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#88

Post by 7speter »

texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #4

> 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…

>> The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira, all is decadence."

It's one thing to construct a sentence like that for a fictional story or novel, it's another to write that way for documentation or a legal document.

Re: Write Like You Talk (2015)

#90

Post by [deleted] »

tayo42 wrote: post #40
texaslonghorn5 wrote: post #4

> 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…

Fwiw Stephen King in "On Writing" also says to not use a thesaurus and just use the words you already naturally know how to use. He follows on saying your vocabulary will naturally expand as you read more.

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