alt Hacker NewsWhat does it mean to “write like you talk”?
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Interestingly and coincidentally, I was reading an old thread from 2015 titled "Write like you talk" written by Paul Graham.
The top comment said -
"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."
Full thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10448445
A few decades back when I was a PhD student a British university I taught an undergraduate class and I noticed that the quality of writing in their examination papers and projects was clunky and awkward, in contrast to the admirable, free-flowing, everyday style the way they wrote (as they spoke) on their student bulletin boards. I used to wonder why they didn't write like this in their classwork.
Years later, when writing my thesis I'd routinely find myself at a loss of how to communicate a concept. The solution was always to write down my answer to the question "what are you trying to say".
What I've always interpreted this advice as as is to read out loud what I write and then eliminate the parts that sound weird or like a robot.
Source: Writing for more than half my life and HN has liked some of my articles in the past
Back in 94, when I first started using speech recognition (Dragon Dictate, word-at-a-time recognition) I had a curious experience. I could feel the difference between speaking spoken speech and speaking written speech. Now I've been using speech recognition for so long, I now swap back and forth relatively easily. This ability to switch how I speak comes in handy when writing dialogue or a speech.
The end result is when speaking, I use a slightly more formal version of speech, and that helps me organize my thoughts on the fly in conversation. When speaking written speech, I speak more formally than I do in conversation, but the pacing and pattern is different. I think ahead of what I want to say and then try out 2 or 3 different forms before I actually say what I want into the recognition environment. Then I let Grammarly tell me how I'm an uneducated hick that don't speak good.
I learned the opposite lesson and ended up talking like I write.
I don't write like I talk, because my speech has a bunch of filler in it. Moreover I am often talking at the same time as forming an opinion. (ie trying to figure out why something is the way it is, by asking questions.)
I flatter myself into thinking that I am a eloquent and concise speaker, having listened to my self talk, I can say thats not the case.
The joy (and curse) of writing is that you can condense everything down into nice, tight paragraphs. You can re-order arguments in a way that doesn't make sense orally.
If a rich person tells you to write like you talk, its because they either have the privilege of a journalist editing their quotes and stringing them together in a way that makes sense, or people read what ever mountains of waffle they produce because they are rich.
The point of writing is to get your point across in as fewer words as possible, the point of talking is to socially interact, they only sometimes align well.
Language is a tool, you have to do what's best for your own goal.
If you read Orwell, his message is not necessarily that complex language is worse at transmitting ideas, as he's actually arguing that complex language can hide the speaker's real motivation and deceive more easily.
For Paul Graham, I'd say for him the 'write like you talk' is very good advice since he's interacting with founders whose first language is not English, people with different backgrounds from his, young folks that maybe didn't take an academic route, so for him it checks out to recommend it.
Leslie Laport always talks about how you should always write down what you think. Until you write something down, you only think you're thinking. Also, he's all about writing most things in math over English, since math is less ambiguous (and less complex). And I'd say math is quite different from how you talk.
Now, you can notice how you can have different motivation for the same behaviour (Orwell and Graham), or different behaviour for a similar motivation (Orwell and Lamport). Maybe more interestingly, think about people with the opposite intentions from the ones above: a contractor that wants to mimic sophistication to get a contract with a bank (with representatives also mimicking sophistication); guilds trying to preserve a high barrier of entry. The advice they'd appreciate would be the opposite since their goals differ.
I don't agree with this advice. Reading and Listening are different mediums and they have different strengths and weaknesses. When writing, one should take advantage of the written medium.
For instance, with writing, you can use different variable names. With speaking, you are limited to using 'this' and 'that'. When speaking, you can using different intonations, but while writing you cannot.
Arguing you should not write "complex" things or "formal" things becuase of poor attention spans just makes me sad about the state of literacy.
It means you turn on Voice Access on Windows or dictation on MacOS.
https://archive.ph/2026.04.09-025600/https://arjunpanicksser...
"Write in a way that makes your readers feel like you are talking to them."
Which seems like an epistolary version of one possible (maybe also better specified) paraphrase
Code like you think -> Code so that the machine can thinkIt’s a very good post — and I do agree with the main ideas. It’s pretty remarkable how good writers like Scott Alexander and others are able to consistently pump out good writing, especially when the key does seem to always comes down to clarity (and mostly revision for me). Maybe reps are able to give that over time, but even with getting older and now being able to bounce ideas off LLMs == it still takes me so many iterations before I feel like my prose / ideas / outlines are worth sharing.
I never know what I am going to say or write, but writing is convienient by way of bieng deleetable. I do like words, and sounds, a lot, and am interested in non verbal comunication, especialy in other species, which requires a huge suspension of judgement concerning what constitutes meaning, and how much of it we radiate, cluelessly this last, is the part that the poetry of shared experience can conviegh by way of the written word, sometimes, and for those in the frame of mind to see around the corner and into there own inner world.
One superpower I wish I had is the incredible summarizing into single sentences that you can see in the LLM web UIs when they automatically make a title for a discussion.
I wonder if there’s a way to train that ability.
I would like to see them include some analysis of the first recorded audio conversations such as on wax cylinders or the 1930s WPA/Federal Writers’ Project. Was sentence complexity the same as it is now?
to start with, I would say "write as you talk".
but the idea is dubious: writing/reading is a different transaction than speaking/listening.
It would be easy if all you had to do was make it simpler, but I don't think that's it. Good writers always sound like themselves, you're reading along and you feel like there's a whole person there saying something to you, it's really them and not anyone else. It's magic.
If the average person tries following this advice they'll probably end up with something simpler sounding, and still bad. Which I guess is better than overly complicated and bad? I don't know, doesn't matter, both are bad.
One thing I know for sure though is writing like you talk is dressing down. Sometimes that's good, like when you want to be relatable and down to earth, or maybe you're saying you're a tech bro type, moving fast and no time for nonsense. Other times you should be more formal though.
Again, the great writers don't care, they just pick whatever level of formality makes sense and do their thing.
Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski are good examples.
I don't agree that one should "write like they talk." Certain forms of writing are fundamentally a higher and more complex register of language, because they have gone through more rounds of refinement and editing, while speech is generally composed one-shot; you can't "go backwards" and make edits to your speech, except by going forwards and issuing more speech to make corrections and amendments to what you've already said. That is, speech is "write once," given the fact that it needs to be composed extemporaneously.
Try talking like an academic on the street - you'll get laughed out of the alleyway. Informal conversation often needs to target the lowest common denominator, which is the most you can expect from the average person out in the "real world;" that is, of course, unless you are reading from a prepared speech - which is the composition of a speechwriter, prepared ahead of time, instead of improvised on the spot. Writing can target more advanced audiences because you're not limited by space and time to the people in your immediate vicinity, but people who self-select into your subject matter - for instance, on fora like this one, which represent a small minority of technically inclined readers.
One can write extemporaneously in this style - that's the IRC and chatroom register of written speech, and it has its place, but I don't think this is the form of writing that the author of the article had in mind. For instance, I doubt that this article was composed one-shot in an IRC chatroom and then published verbatim, but went through many rounds of editing. That's not how "people really talk."
Of course, if one is in more enlightened company, their informal, extemporaneous speech can start to take on more complexity and jargon. You need to target your communication to your audience.
For what it's worth, most of this post was written one-shot with minimal revision, but with pauses to think about what to write next. These kinds of pauses are usually known as "awkward" in every day speech over beers. I will maybe go over the post and make some edits as I read over it again.
It means someone I know irl clocked my Hackernews account because how I write on here closely corresponds with how I actually speak. Which is—okay, yeah, guilty as charged I guess. Must've been all that IRC in the 90s.
Being a mediocre writer, I don't know what it means to write like you talk, but I know I've noticed a strong correlation between how ornate one's language is and how little one knows what they're talking about. The people who know the most use the simplest words, and if someone uses complicated language, they're either trying to deceive or to hide the weaknesses of their argument.
This only goes for specific cases, of course. E.g. it probably applies more to business language than to novels.
(2025) Seems to be a link-post
I cannot agree with this after reading transcripts of Trump's speeches. It does make sense in some scenarios, but writing like one speaks only works for people who speak clearly and effectively; unfortunately most people are terrible communicators.
Most of the time when people say they 'write like they talk' it's to excuse putting filler words and fluff in their writing to try to squeeze some cheap 'authenticity' instead of focusing on clear simple sentences.
It usually comes off as excessively childish for multiple reasons, including the fact that you can just not write filler words where not saying them can take practice.
How I write is better than how I talk, because by definition I have more time to think. So I aim for the opposite - I aim to spontaneously talk the way I write.
And academic and technical writing should absolutely be lexically dense. It's not poetry, you're trying to express information as efficiently as possible.
Reminds me of that outburst by Harrison Ford on the set of one of the Star Wars... complaining to George Lucas about the writing:
"George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!"
Shew, if I wrote like I talked to other people it would be an entertaining disaster. When you speak, you're speaking to your specific audience, which could be your boss, your toddler, your spouse, your friend of 25 years, your in-laws, your candor in giving a presentation, this list goes on.
I write how I think, and how I think is profoundly shaped by reading, listening, and absorbing.
Write how you talk seems almost arrogant. Writing is an expression of an idea, and how I speak vs. how I write are so vastly different it really does amuse me to chew on this.
I suppose TFA is mostly focused on academic writing [0] (article quote) but the vast, vast majority of people in this world today are not writing academically, they're posting here, or sending a text, or work emails. Good writing means you don't need to assume everyone is an expert or a non-expert. The first thought that comes to my mind here is "mansplaining".
[0] So the common advice to "write like you talk" can be underspecified. It's good to avoid pretentious and formulaic cliches that mask the absence of precise thought, and separately to avoid dense and impenetrable jargon that's hard for non-experts to understand.
Just write!
This is easy to say if you can write, but, what if you are trying to write in a second language?
As an English person, I can write reasonably well without having to know what any of the technical terms for writing mean. I don't need to know any formal rules for writing in different tenses, and even Oxford commas just happen automagically. I can break the rules too, not that I even know what the rules are.
Over the years I have worked with a lot of people from other parts of the world that have English as their second language. They can't write in English purely on instinct, 'writing as one might talk', they are stuck trying to remember the rules and the billions of exceptions to the rules that English has, just to make it hard for the second-language crew. Of course, in Britain, we can slip into Cockney Rhyming Slang, Glaswegian or West Country Speak (tm), for not even the Irish or the Americans to understand us.
Hence, I wonder about the author. Is English his first language? We are in 'true Scotsman' territory here, and a native English speaker is just going to write, they are not going to write verbose articles such as this one.
Put it this way, a true English speaker has absolutely no idea what a 'past participle' is. They have absolutely no need to know. Whereas the German, speaking his most humourous English, gained from many years of study and watching TV, absolutely knows what a 'past participle' is, but they haven't the foggiest if someone English says 'take a butchers'.
Um, er, um, the, um, real problem with writing as one talks is, er, you know, sometimes, we, er, put in lots of ums and ers. That is the real danger of 'writing as one talks', but, when editing the ums out, we dabble and wreck that flow of words that sounded great but didn't look too great on the page.
Tangentially, this post has stuck with me for years: "How Real Life is Different from Fiction part 2" https://mengwong.livejournal.com/7227.html
As a kid who was a voracious reader, also called a geek by myself (cringily lol) and by others, some quotes that resonated then and still do now:
> Geek kids read many more words than they speak. As a result, when geek kids do talk, they talk like a book.
> They use fully formed sentences, complete with subordinate clauses; if you listen hard, you can almost hear semicolons and parentheses.
> Many geeks, though, speak with "-v" turned on
> In fact, many geeks are so offended by the very idea of telling others what to do that they spend all their lives in the declarative voice, and never use the imperative voice at all. These are the geeks who recoil from moving into management.