Write not like you talk

Yeah, awright bruv…

Every time I post about writing naturally and casually online…

…I get a host of nitwit comments saying “Yeah, write like you talk!”

And all I can say is an eloquent:

No. Stop it.

I see that advice everywhere online, but it’s dreadful.

I mean, sure, do that. Write like you talk, if you want to sound like a dumbass who can’t write…

…you don’t?

Good.

Keep reading, dear reader. Keep reading.

Because the truth is that nobody should write like they talk.

And no, the problem is not that you need to work on your oratory either.

I’m neck deep in an editing project for a fairly major publishing house (not big five, but big in their niche) right now. They asked me to compile a written book from reams of transcribed audio from one of my favourite thinkers.

This fellow was exceptionally erudite. Well-spoken, trained in both public speaking and writing, and at the top of the class in both. He published hundreds of thousands of words and delivered hundreds of thousands more in various spoken formats.

And the transcripts are terrible.

I don’t mean that the transcription is terrible (though it is), I mean that even after I have cleaned it up and smoothed it all out…

…the content is rubbish. It needs a mountain of work to make it work for the written form. But then, that mountain is why I’ll be paid five-figures for the editing job.

Nobody writes like they talk, and nobody should.

There is one simple problem with writing like you talk, which is, dear reader, that…

You talk like an idiot.

Don't believe me?

Fine.

Grab a recorder and transcribe ten minutes of your conversation one day. Read it back. Sound like it would make good writing?

Thought not.

Most people talk like idiots.

Now, there are exceptions.

There are extemporaneous speakers who are incredibly gifts in natural oratory. They're persuasive, powerful, eloquent. All off the tip of their silver tongues.

I’m thinking of guys like the late Christopher Hitchens. Or like Sinclair Ferguson. (Just to pick two people on vastly different ends of the spectrum...) And even those people bumble their way through ordinary conversation and it requires focused attention to let their rhetoric rise up.

But wildly different belief systems aside, there’s something that all people with silver tongues have in common.

They write a lot. And almost everything they say in those soaring speeches… is something they've written about before.

They don’t write like they talk at all.

They talk like they write!

That is a very different approach entirely. Instead of dumbing down the written work, they’re amping up the oratorical. They’re learning to speak in focused and clean ways.

But even there, they don’t quite write the same as they talk because they generally understand the truth that applies to even the most eloquent orator.

Writing and speaking are completely different media.

There’s some overlap, sure.

After all, both are communication of ideas through the medium of words. So there’s some similarity.

But when you're speaking, whether prepared or extemporaneous, you have to factor in the reality of the medium. You have to understand the experience of consumption in your chosen medium.

This is something I have to think about every single time I prepare the Write Way Radio for paid subscribers, or when I script out audio content for courses or for apps like Dwell.

Because there’s a huge difference in how people consume speech versus text.

With written text, people can stop and think, then continue. They can fly over parts of it, glance back to check something, stop to mull over a complex idea. They move at their own speed as they go. They even set their own direction, skipping over and circling back as required.

In speech?

They move forward at the speed you speak at and they have no choice (unless it's recorded). Believe me, it’s agonising as a Scotsman listening to Americans whoooo taaaaaalk sooooooo sloooooooooooooowly y’aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall. Putting yous on two times speed just brings yous up to our normal speed.

But cross-atlantic joshing aside, the difference changes how you communicate.

Writing can afford to be more concise, more stripped back. Speech needs to circle, reinforce ideas, build in pauses etc. The rhetoric looks different.

As one example, the thinker I’m editing often uses an and-based sentence structure when he’s making a list.

So something like this:

Writing well drives followers who respond, and it drives readers to connect, and it drives customers to buy, and fans to evangelise your message to the watching world.

It works well as a spoken sentence (at least for one I quickly drafted to illustrate the point). But when you write that out, it’s far stronger to write it like this:

Writing well drives followers to respond, readers to connect, customers to buy, and fans to evangelise your message to the watching world.

It’s cleaner and tighter without those ands - because they served to pace the delivered speech out, to give the readers time to process each point. In writing we don’t need that. Every aspect of oratory and rhetoric needs to be reconsidered when you change medium.

Some of it works across mediums, some of it does not.

That’s only the START of the problems though. You have to consider the effect of intonation as well.

After all if you were to transcribe speaking it would look like this notice what's different there is no punctuation.

But when we write, we need to parse the intonation into sentences. Add commas for pauses, full stops for longer ones, space, question marks etc.

If you were to transcribe speaking and update it for the written word, it would look like this. Notice what's different? There is punctuation, we've made choices for tone and effect that shape how the reader reads it.

I could have done that last paragraph like this:

If you were to transcribe speaking and update it for the written word? It would look like this. Notice what's different, there is punctuation. We've made choices for tone and effect that shape how the reader reads it.

Does it read differently?

You bet.

These are nuances you'd miss if you "write like you talk" instead of thinking about the medium.

The effect of intonation is only the start because we also need the emotion of communication. Now, it’s not surprising that people miss this when most of the CrapGPT dorks who plague social media have no idea how to communicate in human. They have no emotions in real life, so they fail to realise that in writing… You really have no emotions!

None that the reader can hear anyway.

They can't see your face, read your body language, listen to your tone, pick up on all the tiny signals that the human brain is designed to capture.

They just see words.

If you try and write like you talk, you'll miss all those emotions from your prose, because all you’re doing is taking speech and flattening it. You’re not considering all that you’re missing (tone, body language, facial expressions, volume etc.) and replacing it with alternatives (word choice, sentence structures etc.) that convey the same on the page.

You’re simplifying it so much that you're missing the rich tone that words can give you.

There's a difference in choosing furious over angry over raging. And sure, when I'm talking I might say "Yeah I was raging" and mean I was mildly annoyed. But the person I’m talking to will hear the tone and see the slight smile on my face, and realise what I meant.

In prose you don’t have all that extra detail, and to just strip it out by “writing like you talk” is failing to communicate.

For all those reasons, I never "write like I talk".

But when I'm writing these newsletters I do write conversationally.

(Technically, I write them conversationally and then amp up the energy to eleven in editing. My daily emails are more conversational in tone.)

It's how I would talk if I was smarter, you were paying more attention, we all had perfect recollection, and there were no distractions etc.

No, it's not "how I would talk", but…

…it sounds like I could be saying it to you.

It flows. It's not formal and stuffy. I don't use fifty-seven words when one would do. I use contractions, like in the tweet that started this whole rant.

But despite all that, it's a lot more trimmed down than any conversation, even a written speech.

There are no overdeveloped transitions, filler words, memory-aids etc.

The vocabulary is higher, the inflections of tone are conveyed in the cadence of the words, not in my voice. Energy has to be edited onto the page instead of just raising and lowering my voice, or speed of speech. Emotion has to be created with word choice, language and structure.

Of course, conversational writing isn’t always appropriate either, but that’s a discussion for another day…

For today, remember that writing and speech are both different mediums, with different tools.

Treat them appropriately.

And until next time may your pipe inspire many rich conversations and much richer writing.

Yours,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

P.s. I’d be remiss not to mention that one of the best ways to write conversationally is to write quickly. Something that you can learn to do here. Purchase by Saturday Midnight and you can also claim my Placeless Places productivity report.

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P.p.s. The Write Way Radio version is here for paying supporters.