What Does It Mean to Write Like You Talk?

When someone tells you to “write like you talk,” it’s usually a polite way of saying your writing sounds like it was crafted by Little Lord Fauntleroy auditioning for a 19th century debate club. In other words, you might be overcomplicating things— using stiff, overly formal language; sentences that twist into grammatical pretzels; or vocabulary that even Your Writing Sherpa™️ would have to secretly excuse herself from the room to flip through the dictionary to find.

Arguable, such inflated, overly formal language has its place — and is expected! — in certain contexts. But read that sentence again: it's about purpose, context, audience. What are you writing? Who are you writing it for?

This can be a sticky technique to explain, because often, it's not even that you’re doing something wrong, per se. Just as many utterly competent, B+ writing students might never bring their writing to A level, if you're advised to write like you talk, you're missing a particular (and situation specific) je ne sais quoi that makes your writing fall short of connecting. Maybe, the writing reads like a performance or a lecture. Maybe it's off tonally because it doesn't fit the genre.

Say your draft opens with something like, “Throughout the annals of culinary history, few topics have inspired as fervent a discourse as the contentious inclusion of ananas comosus on pizza.” What the "write like you talk" directive is responding to is not the correct versus incorrect sentence itself but its tone. Unless this is the start to a Monty Python sketch, most readers would drop your piece like a hot potato. There's no authentic voice here.

Imagine you're talking with a friendly acquaintance. You'll tidy up your sentences, skip the side tangents, and leave out the inside jokes only your dog would understand. In other words, you'll speak naturally, but with some self-editing.

The feedback is not to write exactly like you talk ("yo, scuz, pineapple on pizza, um, blows") but to dial down the formality of big words for the sake of them, verbose syntax for the sake of it, and inflated formality for the sake of it. Write naturally...the way you talk naturally.

Get More!