Write Like You Talk

Paul Graham argues that writers should write in spoken language, since complex prose makes text harder to read and can give the writer a false sense of saying more than they are. He says specialists discussing difficult subjects use sentences no more complex than everyday talk, and that a useful test is to ask whether each sentence is how the writer would say it to a friend. He recommends reading drafts aloud or explaining a draft to a friend and then replacing the draft with that explanation, and he claims that writing this way puts a writer ahead of 95% of writers.