Source: Writing for more than half my life and HN has liked some of my articles in the past
I literally use my iphone voice to text to transcribe, then go back and edit.
It’s surprising that more people aren’t doing it
I wonder if there’s a way to train that ability.
I have to imagine it comes down to study and practice, just like everything else.
I write how I think, and how I think is profoundly shaped by reading, listening, and absorbing.
Write how you talk seems almost arrogant. Writing is an expression of an idea, and how I speak vs. how I write are so vastly different it really does amuse me to chew on this.
I suppose TFA is mostly focused on academic writing [0] (article quote) but the vast, vast majority of people in this world today are not writing academically, they're posting here, or sending a text, or work emails. Good writing means you don't need to assume everyone is an expert or a non-expert. The first thought that comes to my mind here is "mansplaining".
[0] So the common advice to "write like you talk" can be underspecified. It's good to avoid pretentious and formulaic cliches that mask the absence of precise thought, and separately to avoid dense and impenetrable jargon that's hard for non-experts to understand.
There is value in prose that carries your literal voice when the audience is _people who know you_. There is negative value in writing prose that requires the audience to _read it in your voice_ in order for it to make sense, avoid offense, or convey intent.
My prose changed first: it became plain spoken, as devoid of contextual subtlety as I could make it. My career benefitted. My spoken interactions followed.
The only thing that bothers me about it is the nagging sense that I've become so fucking boring.
It clearly works for him - I hate how he talks, but he seems to be an effective communicator if you only judge by results. Sadly.
What’s the difference?
presumably also advice from them.
but the idea is dubious: writing/reading is a different transaction than speaking/listening.
This is easy to say if you can write, but, what if you are trying to write in a second language?
As an English person, I can write reasonably well without having to know what any of the technical terms for writing mean. I don't need to know any formal rules for writing in different tenses, and even Oxford commas just happen automagically. I can break the rules too, not that I even know what the rules are.
Over the years I have worked with a lot of people from other parts of the world that have English as their second language. They can't write in English purely on instinct, 'writing as one might talk', they are stuck trying to remember the rules and the billions of exceptions to the rules that English has, just to make it hard for the second-language crew. Of course, in Britain, we can slip into Cockney Rhyming Slang, Glaswegian or West Country Speak (tm), for not even the Irish or the Americans to understand us.
Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is. They have absolutely no need to know. Whereas the German, speaking his most humourous English, gained from many years of study and watching TV, absolutely knows what a 'past participle' is, but they haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
Um, er, um, the, um, real problem with writing as one talks is, er, you know, sometimes, we, er, put in lots of ums and ers. That is the real danger of 'writing as one talks', but, when editing the ums out, we dabble and wreck that flow of words that sounded great but didn't look too great on the page.
Years later, when writing my thesis I'd routinely find myself at a loss of how to communicate a concept. The solution was always to write down my answer to the question "what are you trying to say".
It takes a lot of confidence to write academic material in a natural conversational tone because they’ve internalized a rule that says “if it’s easy to understand, I won’t come off as smart enough to belong”.
This only goes for specific cases, of course. E.g. it probably applies more to business language than to novels.
kleton•2h ago
lubujackson•1h ago
In the 1800s and early 1900s, complex sentence structure signaled intelligence for both the author and reader. It was a form of entertainment, in a way, when books were few and nights were long. Try reading Henry James for an idea about what this looked like in practice. Shakespeare is another obvious example of "heightened language" besides archaic words the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise).