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 the important bits and forgetting the rest. When it's presented in written form, such as in a newspaper or magazine article, a skilled journalist has usually done the editing for us.
This means that what we consider a “conversational” tone in written language is not a representation of natural communication so much as an idealised version of it. That doesn't mean it isn't useful to strive for it, particularly in business and academic writing that otherwise tends towards the turgid, but it isn't as simple as telling people to “write how you talk”. Writing conversational prose that achieves clarity whilst not being oversimplified, patronising or banal requires practice and skill.
I also think, conversely, that while a conversational tone can improve formal writing about complex topics, the reverse can be true. It's possible to enliven mundane topics by being less direct and more playful with language.
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 (as opposed to just reading it like normal editing) that helps a lot of people figure out when a piece of writing is bad.
I think this might be because rather than 'write how you talk', what you actually want to do is write how you would talk if you had time to say the best version of your thoughts. This means if you couldn't see yourself sitting down and saying the stuff you're writing to somebody, it's probably no good. If what you write doesn't have a natural flow when spoken from the tongue, it probably won't when people read it either.
I sometimes use this when not writing anything that is destined to directly go to other people in order to help my understanding. When working on a confusing problem I try to write it down as if I was explaining it to another person, and verbalise in my head what I have written (I'm liking the TTS solution someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I might have to bring some headphones into work and try that). It is surprising how often making myself write down the problem as if explaining it to another person makes the blindingly obvious solution that I'm until that point missing (or just over complicating) jump out.
Thinking of the problem as if you have to explain it to someone (even if that someone is an imaginary friend version of myself) forces me to organise my thoughts in a more structured manner (this leads to that which causes the other because of the thing that does the things to the other things so I considered that update but that would conflict with function X... - for more complicated things I'll even draw myself a diagram) which highlights the parts I'm skipping over but shouldn't be.
My adage has always been "if you can't teach it to someone with a minimal background, you don't really understand it." If I really need to study a topic, I prepare as if I was going to give a lecture on it. That usually makes it painfully obvious where the holes in what I know are.
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.
I recently received a lengthy email of minor grammar errors in a programming manual I had written. I thanked the diligent bug reporter, and expressed surprise that so many mistakes had gone unnoticed for as long as they had. He told me that he was blind, and rather than reading the manual, he listened to it through a TTS system, thus catching some problems that might have been easy to miss visually.
This is funny, perhaps like others here, I find I usually have to reduce the complexity of my speech compared to my internal dialogue: particularly in using more commonplace vocabulary. Sadly barely anyone I know (including my wife) understands half the words I use. Indeed sometimes I don't really grok them myself; my brain just finds them most apposite.
So should I write as I [find I need to] speak or should I write with my natural lexicon?
I think so, but I was more thinking about what people actually do when you tell them "write like you speak." Most people I've seen then proceed to dump stuff onto the page and it's even worse.
The advantage of reading it out loud is (I'm guessing) that you process it with a different part of your brain. When you just read it, the words are your own and you don't process it the same way, whereas when you hear it the words in a sense sound external and it is easier to hear where it sounds awkward.
Thomas Mann did that (among other authors). He used to read his work to his family. Just look, how complex and hard to read some of his later work still is. And how complex the sentences are structured.
It is no guarantee, if you don't also think simple and clearly. But it certainly helps.
Yes, clarity is not always the goal in writing, especially fiction. I can imagine Mann sitting down reading his drafts to his family, who are all staring blankly at the ceiling, anxiously awaiting the end.
I think this is more of a technique to help people recognize when what they have written is bad. All too often do I get a student who is perfectly well spoken and who has obviously edited their work turn in something that is a mess. When you point out mistakes, they are usually like "wow, how the hell did I overlook something like that?"
It can be hard to recognize that something we wrote is bad, because we know internally what it's supposed to say. Something about the verbal and auditory processes in our brains seem to help bypass that though. It's by no means the only thing needed, just helpful.
This right here. Anything I've written is read out load, and it's astonishing how many unclear sentences, head smashing obtuseness and general rubbish this picks up.
> 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:
I have found that some people are amazingly well spoken. Absurdly well spoken, as if they specifically chose words so that I could transcribe and type them more easily. Matt Corallo has been really easy to type:
Great results abound when making authoritative statements. I find that I sound the most elegant for hours after I am done with some 10 hour high-concentration programming session. I attribute this to paying more attention to the purpose of communication, whether to transfer knowledge or achieve some other goal, and that good writing/speech is very similar to good programming.
And I have low tolerance for communication when the epistemology is all wrong....
Generally speaking, people who give talks have them prepared beforehand. They practice speaking it, to make sure that it's clear and understandable. So to say that it's easy to write a transcript for a planned talk isn't really saying anything. It's already been written, and writing the transcript of the presentation is just a rewrite. Not all talks are prewritten, but almost all of the good ones are.
I'd also like to note that presentations are very dissimilar to conversations, and some interviews. Conversations are at least a two-directional flow of information (more directions with more people), whereas the bulk of presentations are a one-way flow of information.
Even if they're not "prewritten", they have generally been prepared. For example, if I give a talk, I'll at least have made (mental or written) notes on what points I want to make and in what order.
When I'm in a natural conversation, the list of points I want to make is made up on the fly and is usually quite fluid (changes back and forth as I or the other people talk as a function of what is being said).
That is, talks, even if not already "written", are not the same as natural conversation at all.
I also find that really great impromptu speakers actually do speak more coherently in their natural conversations too. I assume because they're used to pre-editing what they're saying in their heads as they talk.
I don't consider myself a great speaker by any means, but yes, I do find myself pre-editing my sentences when I give a talk. Prewritten talks are no exception. I always need to edit them on the fly to suit the audience and the context.
If natural speech were a modern programming language, prewriting would be analogous to compiling to bytecode. Then you JIT compile it again when you speak. You rarely go directly from source code to machine language, perhaps because there's so much diversity among the "machines" (humans).
Heck, I even "transpile" my talks from time to time. The last time I gave a presentation, my paper was written in English but I had to present it in Korean! Needless to say, that wasted a lot of brain cycles.
Other replies mention the atypical preparedness of presentation text; but I have noticed what you describe in normal life, in normal conversation: some people do indeed seem to speak as if they'd had a chance to revise the sentences / paragraphs in advance. Is it that they care more, and a lifetime's practice has resulted in that kind of automatic organization?
Quite often, I'll have run through a whole series of variations on the probable avenues that a conversation or meeting could take. If you deal regularly with the other party in the conversation, you can often predict with pretty good accuracy what they are going to say. Most spoken communication is just trudging through the same well-established ruts, and throwing out the same sound-bite loops.
Eventually you get to the point that you know that when subject X comes up, Bob is going to deploy his well-worn chestnut that you've heard 147 times before, and you can damn-near repeat it word-for-word.
> Most spoken communication is just trudging through the same well-established ruts, and throwing out the same sound-bite loops.
You're hanging out with the wrong people. Or something.
> when subject X comes up, Bob is going to deploy his well-worn chestnut that you've heard 147 times before,
You should stop hanging with Bob. There are other people out there who have real conversations about what's going on with them, their view of current events, their new ideas for what ought to be done, their new inspirations. . .
I think the more likely and plausible explanation for why some people sound more prepared when speaking is because... they simply are better at it. They've practiced thinking through things, and are adept at putting thought into words. They've developed the think-and-communicate muscle, through lots and lots of practice, and now they can use that muscle with greater effectiveness than your average bear.
This Pico Iyer TED talk is a great example of how a talk can be so well crafted, rehearsed, and mapped, and yet still so conversational and welcoming. Almost a inversion of PG's piece — type as you talk and then talk as you typed.
This is very interesting. Just by skimming the texts, there's a noticeable difference. Matt's paragraphs generally start with "So I..." or "So you/we.." and it's possible to grasp the overall flow of the logic even by looking the beginning of each paragraph, whereas gmaxwell/jgarzik often starts with statements like "This is..." or "I think..." where the relation to previous paragraphs is less clear. Thanks for sharing this.
Depends what sort of conference for a formal one most of the speeches will be planed before hand and speakers will be trying for rhetorical effect and its not natural speech.
And some experienced speakers will have their speaches written out and timed.
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.
Which is very interesting, because, in many cases you'll find people who are presenting to large groups, say, an auditorium full of people, or even just a conference room of willing attendees, in a situation in which the speaker is expected to speak at some length , and it is understood and to be expected that the audience will remain silent in order to receive the message, even in those cases, speakers will continue to use the your-turn, my-turn habits of speech, with the blank-filling um's and ah's and so on.
I listened to a guy from Toastmasters once, and at the start of the speech he said, "Will you please pull me up if I say 'um' or 'ah' at any point?" And he didn't, over the course of an hour or so. The trick, apparently, is to speak deliberately and know what you're going to say before you say it.
If you think of the "um"s, "uh"s, and doubling-back in speaking as the equivalent of pausing and pressing backspace in writing (or crossing-out in pen-and-paper writing), then I think the advice to "write how you talk" becomes even more direct.
An example of pseudo-spoken tone from the article: "The fact that this seems worthy of comment shows how rarely people manage to write in spoken language."
That's a simple phrase to read, but I'm pretty sure it would fly right over my head if somebody dropped it in casual conversation.
I think this is an important point: most of what people verbally say is redundant noise, because in speech you have to account for people who only started really listening partway, or who need something said repeatedly in different ways to understand it. In text, the reader is free to stop and think about something, or just go back and re-read. This means that even if you're writing conversationally, it's easy and not too burdensome to compress long, rambling sentences into succinct ones that convey the same information.
I don't think Paul Graham meant ramble, use "uhs" and "ums" and and expletives as you and other commenters have said.
I think the point was to use common and simple wording so that people can understand without doing a lot of work. People have a lot more practice understanding common and simple words. So it's much easier for them to read, no matter how smart they are.
I think this was pretty clear in PG's essay, but the headline probably threw people off. Maybe he should have said it differently, such as "Make your writing as simple as your speech."
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 of their stream of consciousness nature.
Reading these two types of writing side by side (as in this ama), convinced me that 'write as you talk' can seem quite odd.
The advice does work fantastically well with people who feel compelled to use very formal language to make their point. In those instances,
Write like you talk could mean: write in a simple way.
"The Reddit mod was simply transcribing sentences as Bill was saying them."
To clarify, it's widely accepted it was a Reddit admin, /u/808sandhotcakes, that was responsible for the original transcription of Bill's responses.
As has been pointed out in your child posts, the top level responses have since been edited and have improved drastically.
The Admin's username has also been removed from the OP.
To give a better idea, check this archive.is of before the edits. [1]
>Uh yes I know Tom, we called him co back then cause he was a hipster, I sent someone looking for Co looking for him years ago, this person found him and he was running for office, the person I sent was not someone your father wanted to be affiliated with while running a campaign, he was a funny guy if you're his kid you're probably funny too. Tell your Dad to lay low, his past is gonna catch up with him.
>Uh, yes, I know Tom. We called him "Co" back then, cause he was a hipster. I sent someone looking for Co looking for him years ago, this person found him, and he was running for office. The person I sent was not someone your father wanted to be affiliated with while running a campaign. He was a funny guy. If you're his kid, you're probably funny too. Tell your Dad to lay low, his past is gonna catch up with him.
The contrast between this AMA and his previous one is stark.(The previous one [2] handled by the well loved admin /u/chooter, who was recently fired.)
One should write in an audience appropriate way. The Bill Murray AMA was written by someone with no real understanding of written English.
The link you submitted seems to work for mobile only, for some reason I couldn't open it from my computer, so I give the non mobile version below [0].
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.).
If you just went to that thread 15 hours ago, you did not read the original answers. It was vastly different before it was edited. It was unreadable for me.
68 words in the opening sentence for one of the replies.
It is also good to note that what kind of editing your brain does- the standard that people accept for what clear speech is supposed to sound like, what they strive for and hear in their heads- changes over time. There is more than one way to clean up the exact same actual speech stream, and the cultural norms for the correct way to do it shift.
This is made most obvious when comparing dialogue between new and old movies (good ones, anyway- ones that had good popular contemporary reviews; comparing what people at the time considered badly-written stilted dialog tells you nothing). Everybody knows that preferred writing styles change, but movies document the changes in what people consider to be "normal sounding" speech over even relatively short periods of time (a few decades).
I'd love to hear from NLP experts on speech vs writing from a machine's perspective.
> not a representation of natural communication so much as an idealised version
Written language lacks stresses and intonation. I wonder if the written dialect attempts to fill in this gap, and whether tonal languages idealize their speech differently.
> conversational tone can improve formal writing about complex topics
Spoken language is pretty diverse. The data set we've been using for spoken language understanding is a corpus of telephone conversations between strangers about an assigned topic. Naturally, this contains a lot of ums and uhs!
But spoken language about technical topics and difficult ideas tends to also be disfluent.
For a long time computational linguists were using algorithms that performed okay on written language but poorly on spoken language. Specifically, they used algorithms that weren't linear-time in the length of the input. This meant that the input had to be pre-segmented, so you had to run another model before the parser, and then accept the errors from the previous model.
Now that we've got linear-time algorithms that are doing everything jointly, it's not so bad. We just need to get a bit better at using intonation features, and parsing lattice input so that we can deal with the recognition errors.
Mostly, it's a relief not to have to deal with the really tortured language often found in journalese. News reports are written really weirdly.
I have an interesting anecdote relating to this, one of my best friends told me the other day that she says the word "probably" as probly and even listening closely to what she says with that in mind it's still difficult to hear anything other than "probably"
Unless we're a Vidal or Buckley, people tend to wander in thought as they speak. It does not come with much forethought. It's typically just a messy stream of consciousness (and not in the Welty sense).
So while overwrought writing can be stilted, "writing like you talk" is just as much a put-off, it often comes off as if there was little forethought and work put into the writing.
So true. I've gotten in the habit of writing copious notes during meetings, and write everything down verbatim. When I first started doing this, I was astounded to find how disorganized most individuals train of thought appeared to be.
What's really interesting is our ability to comprehend the jumble that comes out of our mouth. On one hand, it's impressive what our brains can do to process this jumble, on the other, totally depressing how inadequate we are at stringing together oration.
I like to dictate my writing for a first draft. It helps with the whole write like you speak issue, but it also helps you speak more clearly. You get better at conveying your ideas.
Somehow you managed to miss the point entirely. The point is not "use bad grammar, slang, and swear words." It's just "don't put on airs!" That's it! Not putting on airs means: don't use jargon if the meaning of your sentence doesn't call for it, and don't use awkward turns of phrase to make yourself sound smarter. That's easier said than done, but it goes a long way toward making your writing easy to understand.
This is especially interesting, as pg uses a very creative variation on "Um"[1] (as a method of making people focus on the poigniant/funny statement he just made). I'm not sure if this is a case of someone weaponizing their verbal tic, but I think pg should probably add it to his actual writings.
When listening to someone in person, our brains seem to edit what they say on the fly to make it comprehendible, focusing on the important bits and forgetting the rest. When it's presented in written form, such as in a newspaper or magazine article, a skilled journalist has usually done the editing for us.
This means that what we consider a “conversational” tone in written language is not a representation of natural communication so much as an idealised version of it. That doesn't mean it isn't useful to strive for it, particularly in business and academic writing that otherwise tends towards the turgid, but it isn't as simple as telling people to “write how you talk”. Writing conversational prose that achieves clarity whilst not being oversimplified, patronising or banal requires practice and skill.
I also think, conversely, that while a conversational tone can improve formal writing about complex topics, the reverse can be true. It's possible to enliven mundane topics by being less direct and more playful with language.