Write Like You Talk (2015)

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 “spoken”. By doing this he is removing complexity in the interests of simplicity, and this may well fit with his goal for this work. It is not a general panacea.

I don’t disagree that sometimes it is more useful to have a simple introduction, leading to a more complex and better understanding of a subject before layering on the exceptions and subtleties - there is certainly a place for simplified knowledge transfer, our entire system of education is based on this “lies to children” approach.

What I do disagree with is that it’s a useful go-to rule. The world is inherently complex, and we deal with complexity by introducing layers of abstraction (more of the “lies to children” approach, but this time to ourselves). Not everyone needs to understand the quantum mechanical physics of a positive charge in order to understand that balloons will stick to your hair if rubbed against certain materials, but if you’re trying to explain that, then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed. Sometimes that abstraction is very thin, and the language used will reflect that; at other times, “it just does” is the way to go… party handbooks printed on balloon packets are different to undergraduate textbooks.

So written language, with all its capability for complexity, context, subtlety and nuance should be employed when that capability has a useful effect. That means understanding one’s audience and tailoring to suit, not just a blindly-applied rule to “write as you speak”.

> 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 convey some nuance rather than using a generic word which is much broader. Check out the often reposted article about Webster's 1913 dictionary. Also this is exactly the purpose of the thesaurus. So yes, if done right, you ARE "saying more than you actually are."

> The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago:

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

"mercurial" does the trick in the quoted example, does Paul have a patch?

When you talk you talk custom calibrating to who and the environment (place and time). When you write that expands to a whole lot more diversity of mindsets. As much as I like and agree with many points that PG publishes, as general advice I'd say this is terrible advice adding that it would be okay advice if it would have been more modest, as in Blog Like You Talk for example.

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 breadth of vocabulary.

But I generally agree that carefully crafted written language can capture and transport thoughts much, MUCH more effectively.