9 ms·

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

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.

flashman 11y ago
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.
- chirau 11y ago
  I see what you did there, you wrote how you talk :)
- PantaloonFlames 11y ago
  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.
  - flashman 11y ago
    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.
rcthompson 11y ago
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.
charlysisto 11y ago
What you just wrote illustrates perfectly your point.
cousin_it 11y ago
So, "write like you want to talk"?
- diqu 11y ago
  I think this would be sound advice in this context. "Write like you see yourself talking when imagining your speech".
biswaroop 11y ago
> brains seem to edit 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.
- syllogism 11y ago
  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.
- foota 11y ago
  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"
kanzure 11y ago
> 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: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/ 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-corallo-sidechains/ 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-cryptography/ 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-impacting-block-size-proposals/ 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/ 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....
- trobertson 11y ago
  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.
deleted 11y ago
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gh02t 11y ago
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.
- unimpressive 11y ago
  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.
- vonnik 11y ago
  stream-of-consciousmess ;)
- flipside 11y ago
  So in short, "talk what you write" might be better advice than "write like you talk".
- visarga 11y ago
  > read what you have written OUT LOUD 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.
  - tjr 11y ago
    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.
userbinator 11y ago
Perhaps "talk like you write" could be better advice for some people, depending on how they write. That said, "um and ahh" for filler is still vastly better than "like".
entelechy0 11y ago
This comment is anything but clear
DigitalJack 11y ago
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.
deleted 11y ago
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lquist 11y ago
It's funny you mention this, because pg himself has a bunch of filler words when he speaks. See random video of him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lcp0uZsY7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lcp0uZsY7k.
mc32 11y ago
I agree with the above. 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.
guybrushT 11y ago
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. [1] https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bill_murray_ama_round_2/ https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bi...
- S4M 11y ago
  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.). [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bill_murray_ama_round_2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_...
  - maaarghk 11y ago
    Although, the OP says "edit- top level responses edited for grammar and punctuation" so it was probably a more marked difference before.
  - Nexxxeh 11y ago
    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.
- Nexxxeh 11y ago
gliese1337 11y ago
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).
darkerside 11y ago
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.
- randallsquared 11y ago
  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.
charlesism 11y ago
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.
- PantaloonFlames 11y ago
  "put on airs" - what exactly does that mean? These airs, where would one obtain them? And on what would one put these airs? on what?
  - charlesism 11y ago
    Fair enough :) Writing well is hard, and I make plenty of my own mistakes.
thedevil 11y ago
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."
- mark-r 11y ago
  It's not just word choice, but style that matters.
  - thedevil 11y ago
    I definitely agree.
anonbanker 11y ago
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. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ
jnem 11y ago
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.
alexyim 11y ago
Venkatesh Rao's description of a "writer/thinker" split is interesting and relevant here too. 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-writers/answer/Venkatesh-Rao?srid=t3A&share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-tips-for-advanced-writer...

flashman 11y ago

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.

chirau 11y ago
I see what you did there, you wrote how you talk :)
PantaloonFlames 11y ago
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.
- flashman 11y ago
  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.

rcthompson 11y ago

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.

charlysisto 11y ago

What you just wrote illustrates perfectly your point.

cousin_it 11y ago

So, "write like you want to talk"?

diqu 11y ago
I think this would be sound advice in this context. "Write like you see yourself talking when imagining your speech".

biswaroop 11y ago

> brains seem to edit 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.

syllogism 11y ago
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.
foota 11y ago
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"

kanzure 11y ago

> 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: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/ 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-corallo-sidechains/ 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-cryptography/ 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-impacting-block-size-proposals/ 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/ 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....

trobertson 11y ago
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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gh02t 11y ago

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.

unimpressive 11y ago
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.
vonnik 11y ago
stream-of-consciousmess ;)
flipside 11y ago
So in short, "talk what you write" might be better advice than "write like you talk".
visarga 11y ago
> read what you have written OUT LOUD 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.
- tjr 11y ago
  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.

userbinator 11y ago

Perhaps "talk like you write" could be better advice for some people, depending on how they write. That said, "um and ahh" for filler is still vastly better than "like".

entelechy0 11y ago

This comment is anything but clear

DigitalJack 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

lquist 11y ago

It's funny you mention this, because pg himself has a bunch of filler words when he speaks. See random video of him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lcp0uZsY7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lcp0uZsY7k.

mc32 11y ago

I agree with the above. 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.

guybrushT 11y ago

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. [1] https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bill_murray_ama_round_2/ https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bi...

S4M 11y ago
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.). [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bill_murray_ama_round_2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_...
- maaarghk 11y ago
  Although, the OP says "edit- top level responses edited for grammar and punctuation" so it was probably a more marked difference before.
- Nexxxeh 11y ago
  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.
Nexxxeh 11y ago

gliese1337 11y ago

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).

darkerside 11y ago

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.

randallsquared 11y ago
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.

charlesism 11y ago

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.

PantaloonFlames 11y ago
"put on airs" - what exactly does that mean? These airs, where would one obtain them? And on what would one put these airs? on what?
- charlesism 11y ago
  Fair enough :) Writing well is hard, and I make plenty of my own mistakes.

thedevil 11y ago

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."

mark-r 11y ago
It's not just word choice, but style that matters.
- thedevil 11y ago
  I definitely agree.

anonbanker 11y ago

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. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ

jnem 11y ago

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.

alexyim 11y ago

Venkatesh Rao's description of a "writer/thinker" split is interesting and relevant here too. 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-writers/answer/Venkatesh-Rao?srid=t3A&share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-tips-for-advanced-writer...