October 2015Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what youwrite: write in spoken language.Something comes over most people when they start writing. They writein a different language than they'd use if they were talking to afriend. The sentence structure and even the words are different.No one uses "pen" as a verb in spoken English. You'd feel like anidiot 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 badmaking an example of this book, because it's no worse than lots ofothers. But just imagine calling Picasso "the mercurial Spaniard" whentalking to a friend. Even onesentence of this would raise eyebrows in conversation. And yetpeople write whole books of it.Ok, so written and spoken language are different. Does that makewritten 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 attentionpermission to drift. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentencesand fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression thatyou're saying more than you actually are.You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. Whenspecialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideasin their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than theydo when talking about what to have for lunch. They use differentwords, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary.And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more informallyexperts speak. Partly, I think, because they have less to prove,and partly because the harder the ideas you're talking about, theless 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 muchmusic 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 fancylanguage in prose. And then of course there are cases where writersdon't want to make it easy to understand what they're saying—incorporate announcements of bad news, for example, or at the morebogus end of the humanities. But for nearly everyone else, spokenlanguage 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 wayyou usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask "Isthis the way I'd say this if I were talking to a friend?" If itisn't, imagine what you would say, and use that instead. After awhile this filter will start to operate as you write. When you writesomething you wouldn't say, you'll hear the clank as it hits thepage.Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everythingthat doesn't sound like conversation. I even fix bits that arephonetically awkward; I don't know if that's necessary, but itdoesn't cost much.This trick may not always be enough. I've seen writing so farremoved from spoken language that it couldn't be fixed sentence bysentence. For cases like that there's a more drastic solution.After writing the first draft, try explaining to a friend what youjust 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 peoplemanage to write in spoken language. Otherwise everyone's writingwould sound like them talking.If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be aheadof 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentencethrough unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend.Thanks to Patrick Collison and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.
