GoKawiilPeople often say to “write like you talk.” Paul Graham has a post titled “Write Like You Talk” where he says explicitly that written language is worse than spoken language because
“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” “The complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you’re saying more than you actually are”
He gives concrete advice: “Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation. … [If you have] writing so far removed from spoken language that it couldn't be fixed sentence by sentence … try explaining to a friend what you just wrote. Then replace the draft with what you said to your friend.”
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell also identifies complex and formal diction as a way to mask emptiness, “to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. … A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. … If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
But Orwell doesn’t make the same distinction between spoken and written language; in fact he says that “When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style.” And Graham himself elsewhere says that “I'll often spend 2 weeks on an essay and reread drafts 50 times” and “I'm sure there are sentences I've read 100 times before publishing them” which is the opposite of how conversations work.
In contrast, Scott Alexander claims that it only takes him “a couple of hours” to write a post and that “I don’t really understand why it takes so many people so long to write. They seem to be able to talk instantaneously, and writing isn’t that different from speech.” But then Scott is often considered a digressive or even “astoundingly verbose” writer.
There’s debate over whether speech or writing is more “complex” at all, with scholars taking sides based on the metrics they use for complexity and the datasets they analyze. In particular, there’s debate over whether speech or writing uses more subordinate clauses. Subordinate clauses are so called because they can’t stand as independent sentences. They have a few common types:
The adverbial clause functions as an adverb: it modifies the sentence or some element of the sentence, e.g. by adding information about time, place, manner, reason, or condition. She arrived when the party had already started. After the parade ended, we went for a walk. The game was canceled because of the heavy rain. The noun clause (or “nominal” or “content” clause) functions as a noun: usually it’s a that-clause or wh-clause. He told her (that) she was smart. I know what you did. She asked where the files were. The relative clause (or “adjectival” clause) functions like an adjective: it modifies a noun or pronoun. The book that I bought yesterday is excellent. Students who study regularly tend to perform better. The house where I grew up has been sold.
The most intuitive comparison of spoken and written English is between matched narratives; ask test subjects to describe the same scene with either an oral or written narrative. The two studies that use this method found more subordination in speech.
Beaman (1984) found more subordinate sentences in speech (18% vs 13%) and more compound sentences with subordinate clauses in speech (27% vs 18%) from a sample of women presenting spoken or written narratives.
... continue reading