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?
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.
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4>
The point remains: to get the words right.
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.
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.”
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.
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 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'.
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.
Yeah, we're going to have to agree to disagree here.
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.'
How about:
He said "After Altamira, all is decadence."
That is the way I would probably phrase it if spoken. Assuming of course that "he" is clear from the context - if not I would use the subject's name.
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.
If the reader is reading for work, you're much better off writing something that is short, clear, and easy to digest.
> 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.
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.
If you're writing for an audience unfamiliar with mercurial then what you said is appropriate.
As is with a one liner, you wouldn't put that into a tutorial but you might include it without description in a CppCon talk.
It's one thing to construct a sentence like that for a fictional story or novel, it's another to write that way for documentation or a legal document.
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.
he didn't say "write badly". plenty of people can speak informally without being meandering and directionless.
"the mercurial artist" or "the mercurial Picasso" would have been much better than "the mercurial Spaniard"
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”.
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.
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?
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.
You sound like a Youtuber!
> 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.
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?)
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.
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".
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.
Funny, I thought it refuted Graham's point, very effectively.
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.
I re-read your post. You and David Milch agree:
It depends on what you are conveying. Different approaches for different situations.
Chances are good this does not describe most of the people reading the original article or this comment section.
"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."
Why does everything have to be "optimized" with Paul? I'll take verbose misfires any day over rigid plain-speak.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually I could imagine Neil Oliver would say something like this in one of his documentaries.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/d...
> 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.
Well said!
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!
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.
*sarcasm, e.g.
"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'
- spoken words (live events, political speeches, etc)
- recorded words
- written words (blogs, books, papers)
Spoken words have the highest activation energy. Hence, the value that we expect is very very high. There is commitment of time.
Recorded words are speeches, discussions, lectures. Lower than listening something live.
Written words have the highest volume in today’s society. Also the lowest activation energy for the writer.
If written words are not edited, thought through, the increasing volume adds to the noise rather than a better signal.
“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.
Funny, I thought it was a phonetic transcription of Scottish dialect (whence are derived many Appalachian speech patterns, of course).
> 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.
Transcript of natural conversation is not a simple readable text. Instead, it requires a lot of editing to become one.
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.
Works pretty well, but tends to draw sneers from purists.
Meh. I don't particularly care. People tell me they enjoy reading my stuff. I enjoy writing it.
I find it annoying and it dims my view of the poster.
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.
(https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... some reading I found on the subject)
