Say Your Writing
28 May 2025
Here's one of the best tips I know for writers, which was told to me by Bruce Eckel.
Once you've got a reasonable draft, read it out loud. By doing this you'll find bits that don't sound right, and need to fix. Interestingly, you don't actually have to vocalize (thus making a noise) but your lips have to move.1
1: I suspect what matters here is that you need to trigger the part of your brain that processes spoken word as opposed to written word - and that part is sensitive to blandness.
This advice is for those who, like me, strive to get a conversational tone to their writings. A lot of people are taught to write in a different way than they speak, but I find prose much more engaging with this conversational tone. I imagine I'm sitting in pub, explaining the concepts to my companions. I've heard people say that when reading my work, they can hear me speaking it - which is exactly the effect I'm after.
Too often I read prose that feels flabby. Two kinds of flab stand out: corporate prose and academic prose 2 I often tell people that if they read their prose and it sounds like it could have come from Accenture 3, then they are doing it wrong. And, of course, the passive voice is rarely preferred. Speaking makes this flab noticeable, so we can cut it out.
2: A year after writing this, I see a new contender for biggest source of flab - Large-Language Models. In 2025 and early 2026 I've seen a huge amount of LLM writing. It’s not just the common tells, it’s a sense of LLM miasma that pervades the prose. I suspect that saying prose is a good way to combat this as I think it will be harder for LLM-speak to infect our verbal interactions. And it's also more important, as LLM-speak gets more common, there's more value in sounding like an actual human.
3: I pick on Accenture since they are a big consulting company, and thus do all the things needed to sound blandly corporate. The worst case I ran into was many years ago when some sparkling prose by a colleague of mine was turned by editors at Microsoft into a tasteless pudding. There is a perceptible corporate way of writing, often learned subconsciously, that is rife and ruinous.
In my case I find I constantly (silently) speak the words as I'm writing.
Notes
1: I suspect what matters here is that you need to trigger the part of your brain that processes spoken word as opposed to written word - and that part is sensitive to blandness.
2: A year after writing this, I see a new contender for biggest source of flab - Large-Language Models. In 2025 and early 2026 I've seen a huge amount of LLM writing. It’s not just the common tells, it’s a sense of LLM miasma that pervades the prose. I suspect that saying prose is a good way to combat this as I think it will be harder for LLM-speak to infect our verbal interactions. And it's also more important, as LLM-speak gets more common, there's more value in sounding like an actual human.
3: I pick on Accenture since they are a big consulting company, and thus do all the things needed to sound blandly corporate. The worst case I ran into was many years ago when some sparkling prose by a colleague of mine was turned by editors at Microsoft into a tasteless pudding. There is a perceptible corporate way of writing, often learned subconsciously, that is rife and ruinous.