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 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.
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.
So should I write as I [find I need to] speak or should I write with my natural lexicon?
Know your audience.
"Dumb down" your writing, but only if it will help you communicate with the person (or people) you're targeting. Else there's no benefit to it.
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.
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.
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:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/
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:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/mit-bitcoin-expo-2015/matt...
For comparison, gmaxwell is more difficult to transcribe because of compressed deeply parenthetical spike bursts:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/gmaxwell-bitcoin-selection...
and I remember jgarzik gave me lots of trouble recently during his talk:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/issues-impa...
For more comparison, here was an impromptu sit-down session with a few (high-energy) friends:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/snarks/
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home?language=e...
And some experienced speakers will have their speaches written out and timed.
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 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."
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.
[1] https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bi...
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.
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.).
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_...
68 words in the opening sentence for one of the replies.
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).
That said, "um and ahh" for filler is still vastly better than "like".
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
Feynman's lectures are a nice instance of this.
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.
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.
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 agree with the spirit of pg's essay, but I also agree that there's probably more to it.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-tips-for-advanced-writer...
These airs, where would one obtain them? And on what would one put these airs? on what?
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.