It’s so easy to say, but can be so difficult to do – write like you talk…
No, not literally – imaginative spelling to approximate your accent sho’nuff won’t help you communicate better – but it’s much easier to read text that appears conversational.
Trying to sound ‘literary’ or authoritative all too often results in depressing marketing speak and a contrived style that distances, rather than engages your reader. And if someone needs to read something twice, you haven’t been effective at getting your message across, have you?
Writing ‘myself’ instead of ‘me’, or addressing others as ‘yourself’ puts up a subtle barrier between you and your reader – they know they’re being sold to. Badly. Same goes for any of those marketing buzz words that nobody uses in real life – verbs like ‘leverage’, ‘enable’ and ‘action’, for instance. There are very few sentences containing any of these words that wouldn’t work better if you replaced them with something simpler. Like ‘use’.
The point: Writing conversationally, even when it’s for business, doesn’t demean your writing. It helps you to communicate, that’s what it’s for. And it works too – would you really have read this far otherwise?
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