> 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?
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.
I agree with King on that. A thesaurus is great for finding words you know but don’t use often. Learning new words from it… you’re usually missing important nuance.
King is right about that. If you want to become a better writer, you need to read more good books with high quality prose and stop reading garbage. The thesaurus, while sometimes useful, can become a crutch. Stylistically the great writers will rub off on you if you read them carefully.
John McPhee takes a different approach. Whilst he cautions against over-reliance on the thesaurus, he's a full-throated advocate of a good dictionary:
In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. Writing teachers and journalism courses have been known to compare them to crutches and to imply that no writer of any character or competence would use them. At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary. Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line—how each listed word differs from all the others.
The first sentence is about the writer; the second about the reader.
If writers aren't learning new words, then readers can't learn from them. When do writers learn new words? From reading! Who writes what the writer reads? Writers.
King seems to be saying "the best way to discover new words is through the labor and chance of picking up the right books and finding some words you had not read before". So all words that can ever be useful have already been written or will be invented by fiction writers, and it is up to you to read a variety of styles and types of fiction rather than the compendium on your shelf. I find this notion silly.
The answer of course is a blend. If someone is leaning on a thesaurus to make bad writing good, there will be a problem, too.
There's a huge potential collection of words you can use. But there's also the words in the current zeitgeist that will be meaningful to your readers.
The only way you can learn these words and give them a proper weighting of "usefulness" and understand their fundamental nature is to read. Yes, you can get definitions and similar words from tomes, and even examples of usage, but you don't really understand the connotations or colloquial uses until you have seen other people use them in full context.
Of course, there are times when one might want to dredge up an infrequently used word, coin a new one, or transport something from current spoken vernacular onto the page. This should be a tiny fraction of where our chosen words come from, though. Reading is the tool to build usable vocabulary, even if it isn't fetch.
I am sure this is out of context, but I regularly use a thesaurus to find names for patterns in my code/design/architecture. Applies to class names, variables, even functions.
I don't think King was saying "never use a thesaurus", he was just pointing out that relying on it too much is not a good way to develop as a writer. The way you do that is by reading great books.
I often use thesaurus to translate complex words into simpler ones, it really does improve the overall writing especially if you are biased towards redundant complexity ...
That's it, it'll depend entirely on the context. Maybe if you're selling something you should write like you talk, or if you're posting comments / opinions on an orange/brown/grey website, but if you're writing "A History of Ancient Britain", it's not exactly you'd talk to your friends about; it's a book, it's to educate and to entertain. Do you talk to your friends to educate and/or entertain? I mean the latter, sure, but people even change how they talk when they are entertaining someone else, so. idk.
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..
As a reader I would prefer the writer not repeat themselves and write less, rather than try to find some fancy way of not “sounding” repetitive, but in reality finding yet another way of repeating. I prefer actual repetition to that.
More precise words aren’t always better either. Having someone easily grasp what you are saying works much better for conveying information.
Complicated writing is lazy writing.
“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
And to make a point that perhaps is restating yours, or overlaps with yours, I think some good writing is "dense" the way that certain foods are calorie dense.
You can intentionally write in a way that's different from your natural voice if your goal is, say, information density, or expressiveness that conveys personality or that makes the experience of reading more enjoyable, or to allow writing to shimmer with all of its contextual entanglements.
Of course people can attempt to do this and make a reading experience worse, and I think writing how you talk can be a helpful rule of thumb for certain use cases.
> When you're writing / reading, it's much easier to parse complex sentences.
All other things being equal, I think this is only true because you can reread them at will and puzzle over them until you think you know what the author was trying to say.
Sometimes there's value in that. A good writer knows how to mix up the pacing of their prose, to organically guide the reader into engaging more fully with the parts that communicate complex ideas while the connective tissue disappears effortlessly into the background. But in the hands of a less skilled writer complex language is usually worse on balance: they don't understand that prose should always be economical, that less is almost always more, and many really do suffer from "the false impression that [they are] saying more than [they] actually are." Whether they're writing flowery romance fiction or technical manuals, they get high on their own supply without considering that writing is first and foremost a tool to convey meaning.
The "mercurial Spaniard" bit seems fine out of context. However, in context it had better be clear who that person actually is.
I speak as I speak and write as I write. There need be no competition between the two. What Graham is doing here is reducing two very different media to one.
I love the rich complexity of language you can find in any book by Gene Wolfe. Much of how he writes allows him to communicate two truths in one thick sentence or leave us puzzling over a philosophy. I'd never expect or insist Wolfe to speak as he wrote. It would be a crime to his works and a crime to many others'.
> And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance
The vast majority of time the point of "fancy words" are for the author to display to the audience that they know the fancy words.
Unless you really are genuinely talented at language and word choice, it often comes across as a transparent attempt to impress other people and often jars the reader out of the text.
For whom is PG writing here? For sharp minds who can be encouraged and eventually trusted to use nuanced words correctly, or for mediocre minds that will never do so? And if the latter, why are we discussing this article?
There is something exhausting about that example sentence.
Yes, different words embed different meanings. For instance, it's clear to me what Paul means by "fancy" and "complex." The author William Zinsser makes both points: choose great words and write like you speak.
But I agree that somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, there's a time and place for the word 'mercurial.'
And if you wanted to attribute that sentiment to some aspect of his character and/or nationality?
I can perfectly well imagine saying out loud, in conversation or in a spoken presentation, something like "Being the mercurial Spaniard that he was, Picasso said 'After Altamira, all is decadence'".
I don't think there's anything wrong with the vocabulary choices here, but there is a kind of journalistic writing style which favors brevity, probably originally because you're writing to a column inch count, and it drives writers to try to convey those extra connotations in fewer words. An editor will look at my wordy sentence, tell me to get rid of the throatclearing and filler words and reduce it to "The mercurial Spaniard said..." - and they may well be right.
I would probably just omit the "mercurial Spaniard" part, which feels like fluff to me. The statement "After Altamira, all is decadence" is interesting enough that it can stand on its own without the author needing to dress it up any further or attribute it to some part of Picasso's character or nationality. Let the reader decide whether Picasso is being mercurial or how relevant it is that he is Spanish.
Or if it really is important to highlight those two attributes (it's hard to say from this single sentence), then I would probably expand it out a bit to similar to what you have done.
Yes, context matters. Presumably, one is raising the Picasso quote as part of attempting to make some sort of point. Perhaps, as part of that point, one might want to provide context for why this particular comment from Picasso is relevant to the argument.
Communication is not the recitation of mere facts: "Picasso said 'after Altamira, all is decadence.' The ratio of the diameter and circumference of a circle is pi.".
Nor are we like the Tamarians of Star Trek, where mere cultural references have deeply shared denotative meaning. "Picasso, commenting on decadence after Altamira. Shaka, when the walls fell.".
We use other words around these things we say to express the thoughts in our head and try to replicate them in someone else's.
For what it's worth, here's the actual paragraph from A History of Ancient Britain in whose context this sentence was originally written:
The Upper Palaeolithic cave art of Europe was a tradition that lasted for perhaps 20,000 years and it will always be rightly described as primitive. But it is upon those anonymous artists' shoulders - giants' shoulders - that later masters like Picasso were able to stand. The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: 'After Altamira, all is decadence'.
I mean, sure, this is probably not a great use of the word 'mercurial'. Maybe the author thought that Picasso's volatile moods mean the fact that he said something so profound on such a subject lends the quote some particular poignancy? Personally, the idea that a person of a mercurial temperament might dismiss the entire arc of Western art as pointlessly indulgent seems totally in character. I suspect Byron probably said all of literature after Aristotle was repetition during one of his moods, too. So probably not the author's finest turn of phrase, for sure.
Yes I think that "mercurial" is completely unnecessary in this context, and the author probably just added it because he liked the way it sounded.
Seeing the sentence in context I like it even less. The author is apparently trying to make the point that the work of Picasso and other master painters stands on the "giant" shoulders of Paleolithic cave artists. But he doesn't give much justification other than some quote from Picasso which very well may have been made tongue-in-cheek (and doesn't really support the argument in the first place), and I guess also pointing out the fact that Altamira and Picasso are both in/from Spain.
As I said above if the goal is to make a point, then I think it is worth expanding and firming up the argument. What was Picasso's relationship to Altamira? What influence did it have on his work? Are there ideas and techniques used in Paleolithic cave paintings that Picasso also used? How about other "later masters" that he references?
Possibly the author does go into more detail in subsequent paragraphs on the impact of these cave paintings on future painters - I don't know. But based on the quote above it all feels a bit hand-wavey to me. Or like Graham warns about:
> 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.
> attribute that sentiment [mercurial] to some aspect of his character and/or nationality?
traditionally in the English speaking world, Spaniards would in general be described as mercurial (at least in the sense of being driven by passion) so saying "mercurial Spaniard" is more confusing than just saying Spaniard.
The Spaniard, known to change his moods on a whim, himself declared: “After Altimara, all is decadence.”
> And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance rather than using a generic word which is much broader.
Which can be bad when you want your audience to understand you without significant effort. Reading a novel, a reader may be willing, or excited even, to expend effort to get all the nuances and context. But if you’re writing to communicate an idea, you have to match the expectations of your audience, and your audience may have a fixed effort budget to spend on your writing. Most people know this deal, which is why I think using big words is looked down on as self-absorbed or conceited.
I think similarly about code one-liners: they are super hard for another programmer to read, and not everyone has time for that. So they tend to come off as a kind of elitist bragging if not done carefully.
> The Spaniard, known to change his moods on a whim, himself declared: “After Altimara, all is decadence.”
That's even worse. It does nothing to fix the "nobody talks like this" problem if you care about that, and it's as awkward as replacing, I dunno, "He picked up a vermilion coat" with "He picked up a coat the red-orange of mercury sulfide pigment."
If you were writing a technical document, then you'd chop out the whole epithet and just say "Picasso." But that sentence clearly isn't from a technical document, but from a piece where a poetic turn of phrase is more appropriate.
These second order words convey the precise meaning. They exist for a reason.
Authors ought have the responsibility to think through their message and intent and are free to use the most precise words to convey their thoughts. These words stand justified; for expressing delicate emotions you need their help.
P.S. I had to lookup "decadence" I could guess the meaning. It was worth the effort.
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”.
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.
> 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?
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.
That depends on your individual preferences I guess. I think having an audience is at least an indication that you're succeeding at it. Otherwise you have a diary, not a blog.
> I think having an audience is at least an indication that you're succeeding at it.
If the goal is to get an audience, then having an audience is a success.
If the goal is primarily to crystallize your own understanding of things, write thoughts up in a coherent way, or something else which doesn't necessarily involve an audience, then you can have success without an audience.
> Otherwise you have a diary, not a blog.
If the blog is still there for people to see, it changes the kinds of things you write. I don't feel comfortable posting half-incomprehensible jumbled thoughts with partially worked examples, filled with mistakes on a blog, whereas I would feel comfortable writing that privately.
This does definitely depend on individual preferences and whether one can motivate themselves to write well without even the possibility of an audience. I can't.
At least in my experience, writing is a great medium for creative expression. It's a relatively permanent medium to express the fleeting now. I can look back in many years and remember and reflect on what I did and thought.
As long as you're not dependent on having an audience as a form of income, I'd think the blog is intended for the writer first and foremost, and having a readership is secondary/optional.
You are just circling the truth that ultimately we all really have one or two things to really say to the world. And that’s okay.
Refining the few themes that you have conviction for until the end of time is worthy. Hubris is if you think those few things now qualifies you for all things.
It helps if your topic of interest has endless fodder. Misanthropes know what I mean.
> 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
To add to your comment, it’s also been my experience that writing improves one’s speaking. So to the extent that one wishes to be more articulate in his oral communications, he should not write as he speaks.
> 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.
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?)
Orthogonal does not mean unrelated. Take two vectors in the plane. Them being orthogonal means that they have a 90 degree angle between them, so if you know the direction of one of them, the direction of the other one is severely restricted to two choices. So these vectors are very much RELATED. It's just that they are related in a way that makes them maximally different in a certain sense.
So if you want to say that two things are maximally different in a certain sense, you use orthogonal. If you want to say that one thing has no influence whatsoever on what the other thing is, and the other way around, you use unrelated.
For example, if you randomly choose a point in the plane, then its x and y coordinates will be unrelated, but not orthogonal. The vectors [x 0] and [0 y] are not unrelated, but certainly orthogonal.
I understand that orthogonal and unrelated have different meanings. What I'm wondering is: Isn't "orthogonal" much more common on HN (18388 matches in search) than in other places?
I suspect that "orthogonal" is a word programmers fall in love with during some CS class and then overuse because it sounds sciency.
I think that orthogonal is a more visual word than unrelated. It invokes the image of axes pointing into different directions. I suspect many programmers just like this aspect of the word, while unrelated is somewhat bland, and also usually wrong.
Unrelated means two things are not related in any sense. Orthogonal means two things are unrelated with respect to a specific property.
Unrelated is more general, and less precise. Orthogonal restricts the "unrelatedness" to the specific property being discussed. It's also a very visual and intuitive word.
I don't see why what you're saying and what the blog post says are incompatible. I feel like Graham is not saying "simplify your thoughts," but rather "simplify your words." Think Up Goer 5 (https://xkcd.com/1133/) but maybe not as extreme.
What I understood from your comment is that for complex topics (like quantum mechanics), complex language is necessary. This section of the post clarifies Graham's thoughts on the matter:
> You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary.
I kind of agree, although I don't know exactly whether I've studied things that y'all might consider "abstruse".
I don't think this proves the point you want it to. Up Goer 5 loses a ton of information for the sake of its stylistic schtick, and is borderline incomprehensible to people who don't already know the information it's attempting to convey. That's not a problem when you're doing it for comedic effect or for its own sake; it's a big problem when you decide that a devotion to simplistic language should trump actual communication in scenarios where the message matters.
Up Goer 5 is a fantastic example of why complex language is necessary. Even in a short example, it already defines clumsy replacements for the words it's trying to use, like "Sky Bag Air" (Hydrogen), "Funny Voice Air" (Helium) and "Breathing Type Air" (Oxygen). Other artificially-simple language projects, like the Simple English Wikipedia* or Toki Pona generally end up in the same place. You get the linguistic equivalent of copy-and-paste coding.
Sure, "don't use more complex language than necessary" sounds like advice, but anyone capable of working out the minimally complex language needed for any given topic likely doesn't need to be told this.
*A quick skim also suggests that in many places, the SEW just gives up on simple vocabulary and uses phrases like "time-independent Schrödinger equation".
Just so we're on the same page, I agree to the necessity for words like Hydrogen or Helium. And not gonna lie I get a kick out of using fancy words that in today's English-speaking world serve the dual purpose of implying that I'm part of the educated social elite (although I like to imagine this is not the reason why I like using them - I digress).
> but anyone capable of working out the minimally complex language needed for any given topic likely doesn't need to be told this.
This is where I (and I think Graham) disagree with you. In my opinion, this is very not easy. When I write - especially about complex topics - I feel more comfortable complicating my thoughts.
If you don't mind the anecdote, in middle and high school I thought I was hot shit because my classmates would struggle to write enough to meet the page limit and I would struggle to not go over it. As it turns out, this is not because I had more to say. It's because I would use twice the number of words to say it. But it was certainly complex prose that used fancy language - sometimes, I'd argue, parts were even well-written.
I do still think there is an aesthetic to language, but I've grown to believe that simple language possesses beauty too. I can appreciate now how famous writers like Hemingway could agonize for a day over a single sentence. Especially because I look at the four paragraphs I wrote in response and think to myself, "man I bet this is way more complicated and rambly than it needs to be."
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 that end, it should be used -- knowing that if someone like Graham wants to decry the word choice as "fancy", it reveals more about the critic than the writing.
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 just throw it out there for effect. That's grandstanding.
The slower, less urgent pace of writing allows us to overthink things and make odd communication mistakes we wouldn't make in conversation. Graham's advice is good for avoiding this.
The venomous, dangerous, overgeneralized part is - I assume intentionally - snuck in under the radar. Did you follow the link on the word "bogus", and notice what keywords PG thinks are indicative of bogosity? A warning against overwrought language is one thing, but it's carried through to an attack on any complexity in written language (with no acknowledgement that sometimes that complexity is necessary or preferable except for nefarious reasons), and from there to an attack on the caricature of the liberal arts that STEM-lords love to mock without understanding. You start out nodding along to the idea that "mercurial Spaniard" is a bit much, and by the end you're nodding along to the idea that liberal-arts academia is a conspiracy.
Graham didn't say that liberal-arts academia is a conspiracy. He said that the part of the humanities that makes heavy use of words like transgression/narrative/postmodern/gender constitutes "the more bogus end of the humanities".
I won't 100% support that, since I don't have a deep understanding of these areas. But I think it's in a valid range of opinion, given things like the Sokal affair [1]. All sorts of people are reasonably suspicious of the hard-to-understand output of the "Theory" and "Studies" fields, not just "STEM-lords".
The suspicion isn't restricted to the humanities either. We all know that business schools and social science departments are having their own problems right now with trendy findings that don't hold up. There's legitimate controversy over whether work in string theory represents meaningful scientific progress. Etc.
Some areas of academia have more problems with bogosity than others. It seems hard to dispute.
This is an unconvincing straw man argument. Bad writing is just... bad writing.
You can just as easily point to bad speaking and say people should talk more like they write. The fact is, speaking and writing are different, and even within them there are different goals and styles.
While PG's plain-spoken dialectical style attracted me early, and has been effective, I wouldn't call it the end-all-be-all approach to writing. One problem with keeping things conversational is that the substance of the argument can be obscured by flowing narrative that sounds good but doesn't necessarily add up. A dense, precise style might be harder to read—and less politically expedient—but ultimately more effective in establishing the merits of a novel idea.
The 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.
This is mistitled. What it should be is "Write like I talk." Sorry mate but not everyone limits themselves to the stripped back, limited vocabulary of Silicon Valley demotic, even in speech.
There is a good idea in here somewhere, but "write like you talk" is horrific advice that very few people should follow.
"Write casually for a wider audience" might work.
"Avoid complicated sentence structure and unusual vocabulary for a wider audience" might also be good advice.
People don't read in the same way they listen, so one should not write in the same way they speak.
Or, to put it another way, "Gosh, I dunno. Seems kinda like he didn't think that one through, you know? Maybe he knew what he meant, but what he said sure ain't it."
I don't like this viewpoint at all. Spoken English and written English are different languages, full-stop. You can see this in effect when someone is giving a fully-scripted presentation or talk---it just doesn't sound like speaking, no matter how conversational the text is. This is in large part due to the issue of word choice: speakers must choose their words quickly, so they must transmit their idea using lots of small, common words, while writers have time to think about word choice and select the one that transmits the exact connotation the writer is going for. And that's not to mention the nonverbal cues which add a ton of richness to spoken English. Writing allows you to take time to look over your words which lets you re-gain that richness with poetic devices which really allow your words to flow in a way that would sound unnatural and forced in spoken language. I would go as far as to say that if your writing sounds good spoken, it is not very good writing at all.
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.
When I watch interviews of actors and other well known personalities in the 80s compared to now I can't help notice that the standard of spoken conversation seems to have dropped; lower vocabulary, shorter sentences, more interruptions.
I think it would do a lot of good for people to try to speak more like they write, rather than the other way around.
This 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.
The old adage "sorry for the long letter I didn't have time to write a short one" has some relevance here if you approach it from the perspective of maximum efficiency and information density. But that is not always the best path to get your idea across. A conversational style presumes you have a longform narrative and the extra elbowroom for nuance and variations on a theme. I dictate a lot from inside a VR headset and I usually work backwards from the spoken paragraphs to an outline form I can then expand on at a later stage in an email for example. Just sending pages of raw transcript is not great if you respect your readers time.
As an aside, the best mix for me is doing Screen Recording walkthroughs of some topic which can communicate so much more info than a written description while keeping the conversation narrowly focused. Video platforms like Loom, mmhmm, yac, Tella, etc all these provide a better way to coordinate discussion when integrated with typical tools like email and thread messengers.
For a moment I thought that the article was about using phonetic language when writing in English, that may have some sense noticing sound alike words that may not be always obvious for the speaker.
But regarding using a different way to express yourself in written and spoken forms, the media, the context and the timing matters. There are some things that we may rely on gestures or attitude that are not transmitted so easily in written form. Is not the same talking to friends face to face, with all the context you have with them, than to white sheet of paper. And you have time, you are not pressed by the people you are talking to to deliver the right word right now, you can make pauses, you can check for the right expression, you can rewrite what you wrote.
It is not so simple, it have its own advantages, but it is not for everything and everyone at all times.
I think the via media is that you should avoid pompous, inflated, vacuous, officious language that obscures more than it reveals[0] (psychiatry speaks of "stilted speech" as a marker of disorder; I would add that it could be a marker of a character flaw). The emphasis should be on coherence and clarity. The aim isn't to avoid "big words", only the inappropriate use of them. People who sprinkle their speech or writing with forced vocabulary are like nouveau riche simpletons who think that the more gold you wear, the better. The solution isn't to shun all gold and live like a scrub who avoids all gold, but someone who knows how and when to use gold. Temperance in dress, temperance in writing and speech, temperate in all things. And what is temperance? A lived respect for the order that follows from the nature of a thing.
I mean, I do prefer to read text that errs on the conversational side, and I do wish more people wrote this way. But writing is a big tent. There's room for people to use all kinds of language.
Note that I'm not talking about jargon here- people can use words with a very specific, technical meaning and still sound conversational to those unfamiliar with the vocabulary, simply by defining it in everyday language and perhaps using the jargon in a clarifying sentence. And it depends on your audience too, of course. An engineer talking to other engineers can assume a certain level of technical sophistication, and attempts to "dumb down" the conversation would just hinder the group's progress.
Instead, I'm referring to language that (to my ears, at least) sounds pretentious and melodramatic, like the example PG gave. If someone's writing sounds overly ornate to me, then I'm probably not their target audience. And that's fine. The world doesn't revolve around me. That same audience might read my writing and think it doesn't sound ornate enough. Different strokes etc. etc.
Also, "the medium is the message". We don't speak in paragraphs, but we do write with them. This gives us the opportunity to convey ideas in a differently-organized way than we would when we're speaking, which in turn affects the way people receive our message and the take-aways they leave with.
Anyone who has tried to dictate something instead of typing it knows how far off Graham is in this advice. Writing is a different medium than spoken language and reading is different than listening. Readers have different expectations than listeners. The cadence of sentence length is important, and the exact words you use count more. The pace of writing allows one to pick and choose more carefully - being more descriptive or precise as needed - and readers expect this.
He may have meant "conversationally," but that depends on context and your audience. This comment has a completely different tone than I would use in a professional document. Bad writing is bad writing, whether it's an academic paper, a blog post or a legal brief. It doesn't have anything to do with writing like you talk.
All that said, it is a good place to start writing, especially if you are having trouble organizing your thoughts or getting started. Imagine sitting in front of someone and explaining to them what it is you want to convey. Write that all down as if you're chatting. But then go back and edit. And that's a second good bit of advice: Writing is editing.
God no. “Write like you talk” is exactly what causes the drivel my poor wife has to grade all day.
She teaches college English and lit and the crap people turn in is mind blowing. They can barely string together a coherent sentence verbally and they turn around and write the same way…
And I am far from a poster child of “skilled writer”, but , damn, is it bad.
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. Books will necessarily end up using more flowery language because if they didn't they would be extremely boring to read.
> 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.
On the other hand, simpler words and sentence structure give the reader the false impression that you're being more honest than you actually are. Demagogues (especially of the right-wing variety) have known this for centuries: people like simple ideas. Making an idea sound simpler, even if at the expense of actual clarity, means that people will agree with you more readily. That can be dangerous.
But even assuming you're communicating in good faith, sometimes you really need the nuance that only more sophisticated language can grant. In speech, we tend to do this by inflection, body language, and gestures; in writing, those aren't available, so we do it with vocabulary choice and more careful sentence structure. In English (and many other languages), a single spoken word can have dozens of different connotations, or a sentence dozens of meanings, depending on tone and emphasis (see https://bridgeenglish.com/blog/2012/08/28/who-stole-the-mone... for a classic example). In writing, we have to be more precise with the words themselves.
All of that said -
> If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers
is probably true, but I think it says more about 95% of writers than it does about what's actually good. In most disciplines, the techniques it takes to become "not terrible" are qualitatively different from the techniques it takes to be "good". I would posit that writing is one of those; the best writers are fundamentally treating the written word differently than those of us who just want to get through the day and be understood on a basic level. Moreover, "top 5 percent of writers" is not really that good, considering that most readers are reading the same vanishingly small fraction of writers. Even in a professional capacity, where you're going to read design docs and such from a wider array of writers (as opposed to the extreme power-law distribution of novelists), I'm certain that the top 1 in 20 writers in my company are read way out of proportion to everyone else, and some of them are still terrible writers.
> 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.)
> On the other hand, simpler words and sentence structure give the reader the false impression that you're being more honest than you actually are. Demagogues (especially of the right-wing variety) have known this for centuries: people like simple ideas. Making an idea sound simpler, even if at the expense of actual clarity, means that people will agree with you more readily. That can be dangerous.
Success at writing has almost everything to do with who is doing the writing, not the quality of the writing or how clear it is. Michael Crichton
demonstrated this himself at Harvard by turning in an essay written by Orwell, unbeknownst to the teacher, and got a "B-". I have seen this as well. Why do Glen Greenwald articles get so much traffic even though it's just basic political commentary? Because of his brand. Writing and the 'creative arts' has always been sorta a popularity contest or clique. That's why it's called a 'literary scene' or an 'art scene'. At least STEM is not so bad in this regard.
When I first read this essay, it made me go from writing 90% similar to the way I talk, to 100% - literally only writing words and phrases I'd realistically say in a conversation. And I think it's been a good improvement!
Eh so like I think this maybe is primarily good advice for people who are good, like naturally good advice, no I mean speakers, not people like me who like can barely keep the tail end of a thought in my head... co- uh co- coherenty ... like.
Writing 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.
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'
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.
Something comes over most people when they start painting. They paint in a different way than if they were sending a photo to a friend. The image structure and even the colours are different. No one uses a "canvas" in a photo. You'd feel like an idiot using a "canvas" instead of a "camera" when creating an image to send to a friend.
Personally I advocate that people at least try to see if the flow of the writing makes any sense when read out loud—if not, it's probably just poor writing, stemming from a braindump with little organization. And as the very minimum, it would be nice if people stopped putting long-winded parenthetical additions in the middle of unfinished sentences.
I'm pleasantly surprised to see so many diverging with Paul on this point.
“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”
My take is: don't let language get in the way of expressing yourself. Language is one of our most important social constructs. Restricting yourself to simple language has the side effect of losing precision and/or meaning in communication.
I'm curious how this sentiment of pg's rhymes with his two languages, Arc and Bel. As a person who has written a Bel implementation, I find one of the traits the language has is that it's trying to be "straightforward" in the same way spoken language is.
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.
Mea Culpa, and FTR I did not downvote you. In the US, individuals speaking with these dialects face discrimination and I wonder if it is the same among select speakers in the UK?
Ah yes I've read that Appalacian pronunciation, dialect, and to a lesser extent grammar is still relatively faithful to some UK dialects. Fascinating that a literal phonetic transcription was potentially ambiguous.
There is a good message here if you don't get distracted by whatever may particlarly bother you about the presentation.
> You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. [...] Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.
I interpret this as following my basic mode of operation: express everything as simply as I can, even if that makes my brilliant idea sound so obvious. The goal isn't to make myself seem smart, it's to get the idea across. With practice this is natural and you find yourself able to express more complex things than you thought you could. If I use complex ways of describing less complex things I'd be putting a lower limit on what I could express.
Basically, how would Richard Feynman say it? He was a master of using the simplest descriptions of the most complex subjects.
The same goes for coding style. There is a time where fancy metaprogramming will be needed to make something compact and manageable. But that isn't the first thing you should reach for in simpler cases.
But the way people talk naturally does not lead to simple sentences nor simple constructions. People talk in runabout ways, add unnecessary details, miss others and then go back to fill them in. Some people do in fact use complex words and others use too simple wrong words when they speak. People use tone of voice to add meaning and also gestures.
Transcript of natural conversation is not a simple readable text. Instead, it requires a lot of editing to become one.
That's exactly the details to be dropped. Don't get hung up on how the article started with "natural speech", that's the bathwater. The baby is promote simple sentence structures and word choices that convey the problem and solution concisely without fancy complexity of language that doesn't add to understanding.
I really dont think the article is good at promoting that idea. And one problem (frequent with Paul Graham writing) is that it builds false dichotomy in between supposedly simple talk language and complicated written language.
Written language is not inherently more convoluted and complex. Not even on discussion forums with untrained people who dont read after themselves.
> It seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken language.
The written texts end up convoluted frequently because people do write them as they think they would speak. People speak in complex sentences, tone of voice making the difference. Then they see all the horrible warts and try to fix them - badly.
Also, the article does not contain actionable advice on how to write. It does not help you to deal with sentence structure nor help you to refactor bad sentence. It is fluff.
> I really dont think the article is good at promoting that idea.
It isn't. That's why I was pointing out that there's still some value here if you focus on it and not the presentation and all the parts of it you disagree with or otherwise dislike.
> And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informally experts speak.
I guess I've been hanging out with different crowds. I typically find that the harder the subject the more exacting the language has to be to avoid miscommunication.
The better than 95% of writers bit bugs me. It feels like looking at all of written history and saying everyone else was doing this wrong because they don't write simply enough.
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.
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?