Write Like You Talk
The most persuasive version of you already exists. It turns up in meetings.
Here is something I notice constantly, and it never stops being strange.
A client will sit across from me and explain their business, and they will be brilliant. Funny, specific, opinionated. They will describe exactly who they help and exactly what goes wrong for those people and exactly why they are good at fixing it, and they will do it in about ninety seconds, without notes, using words a child could follow.
And then I will look at their website, and none of that is there. Not one word of it. In its place is something beige and careful, written by a person who sounds nothing like the one I just met.
The translation problem
What happens in the gap between the meeting and the website is a translation, and it is entirely unnecessary.
Somewhere between speaking and typing, a filter switches on. The contractions come out. The opinions get hedged. The specific example gets replaced by a general claim, because the general claim feels safer and more comprehensive. The rhythm of actual speech — the short sentence, the aside, the emphasis — gets flattened into paragraphs of even, unbroken weight.
And the person disappears. Not because they wanted to disappear, but because they believed that writing had to be different from speaking, and every version of writing they had ever seen from a business confirmed it.
The dictaphone trick
The fix is almost embarrassingly practical, and I recommend it constantly.
Do not write the page. Record yourself answering the question the page is supposed to answer, as though a friend had asked it. Do not prepare. Do not do it twice. Then transcribe what you said, tidy the worst of the repetition, and stop.
What you will have is better than what you would have written, and you will not quite believe it. It will feel too casual. Too simple. Not businesslike enough. That feeling is the filter trying to switch back on, and you should ignore it, because everyone else’s filter is switched on and that is precisely why they all sound the same.
What to keep and what to lose
Writing like you talk is not writing down every word you said. Speech is repetitive and full of dead ends, and a transcript read cold is exhausting.
Keep the contractions, the rhythm, the strong verbs, the specific examples, the opinion. Keep the sentence that is only four words long. Keep the aside in brackets, if that is how you think.
Lose the throat-clearing, the repetition and the three attempts at the same sentence before you got it right. What remains will be recognisably a person, which puts you immediately ahead of nearly everyone you are competing with.
This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.
