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             Write Like You Talk

             October 2015

             Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you
             write: write in spoken language.

             Something comes over most people when they start writing. They
             write in a different language than they'd use if they were
             talking to a friend. The sentence structure and even the words
             are different. No one uses "pen" as a verb in spoken English.
             You'd feel like an idiot using "pen" instead of "write" in a
             conversation with a friend.

             The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago:

                 The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: "After Altamira,
                 all is decadence."

             It's from Neil Oliver's A History of Ancient Britain. I feel
             bad making an example of this book, because it's no worse than
             lots of others. But just imagine calling Picasso "the
             mercurial Spaniard" when talking to a friend. Even one
             sentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation. And yet
             people write whole books of it.

             Ok, so written and spoken language are different. Does that
             make written language worse?

             If you want people to read and understand what you write, yes.
             Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to
             read. It's also more formal and distant, which gives the
             reader's attention permission to drift. 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.

             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. And in my experience, the
             harder the subject, the more informally experts speak. Partly,
             I think, because they have less to prove, and partly because
             the harder the ideas you're talking about, the less you can
             afford to let language get in the way.

             Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.

             I'm not saying spoken language always works best. Poetry is as
             much music as text, so you can say things you wouldn't say in
             conversation. And there are a handful of writers who can get
             away with using fancy language in prose. And then of course
             there are cases where writers don't want to make it easy to
             understand what they're saying--in corporate announcements of
             bad news, for example, or at the more bogus end of the
             humanities. But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is
             better.

             It seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken
             language. So perhaps the best solution is to write your first
             draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each
             sentence and ask "Is this the way I'd say this if I were
             talking to a friend?" If it isn't, imagine what you would say,
             and use that instead. After a while this filter will start to
             operate as you write. When you write something you wouldn't
             say, you'll hear the clank as it hits the page.

             Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix
             everything that doesn't sound like conversation. I even fix
             bits that are phonetically awkward; I don't know if that's
             necessary, but it doesn't cost much.

             This trick may not always be enough. I've seen writing so far
             removed from spoken language that it couldn't be fixed
             sentence by sentence. For cases like that there's a more
             drastic solution. After writing the first draft, try
             explaining to a friend what you just wrote. Then replace the
             draft with what you said to your friend.

             People often tell me how much my essays sound like me talking.
             The fact that this seems worthy of comment shows how rarely
             people manage to write in spoken language. Otherwise
             everyone's writing would sound like them talking.

             If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be
             ahead of 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't
             let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a
             friend.







             Thanks to Patrick Collison and Jessica Livingston for reading
             drafts of this.


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