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Comment by guybrushT

One of the best (and incidentally, very recent) illustration of your point was seen an AMA by Bill Murray [1]. The Reddit mod was simply transcribing sentences as Bill was saying them. Soon after, /u/BillMurrayTranslator (some random guy) rewrote the exact same content in a more coherent, punctuated and editorialized manner. The difference in readability is stark! Bill's answers were quite hard to understand because of their stream of consciousness nature.

Reading these two types of writing side by side (as in this ama), convinced me that 'write as you talk' can seem quite odd.

The advice does work fantastically well with people who feel compelled to use very formal language to make their point. In those instances, Write like you talk could mean: write in a simple way.

[1] https://m.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3pommg/looks_like_im_bi...

parent guybrushT 11 years ago

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