Write Like You Speak – Conversational Writing Techniques

Are you struggling with low engagement on your content across digital media? Don’t worry there is a solution. Did you ever heard this sentence “write like you speak” or “write like you talk”?

Yes? Did you ever wonder what that was?

This style of ‘writing like you speak’ is called the Conversational Writing Style.

What is Conversational Writing Style:

Okie, let me explain with an example,

Now read the following line.

Each day we try to make the best jeans we can without any distractions, or any idea of perfectionism; for we don’t hold any misguided belief or expectation of conquering the world.

Now read this one.

We make jeans. That’s it. Nothing else.

No distraction. Nothing to distract our focus

No kidding ourselves, that we can be good at everything

No trying to conquer the whole world

we just do our best to conquer our bit of it. So each day

we come in and make the best jeans we know how.

Which one of these is appealing and nice to read?

The second one, right?

Yeah, the second sentence is written with a conversational style, whereas the other one is with a formal style. A formal style of writing may look good for emails and proposals. But conversational style is what people like a lot because it feels like the author himself is talking in front of you directly.

And for the sake of this, Don’t just transcribe like movie subtitles. A big No.

People are tired of reading all emails in their inbox in most of the emails are in a formal tone. It would be refreshing for you if you happen to read content with conversational writing. That’s why great mentors like Digital Deepak, Gary vee, Gary provost, and Divya Kothari insist on “write like you speak”.

Divya Kothari’s webinar inspired me to write this article for you.

In this article, you will get to know what are the techniques involved in the conversational style of writing.

5 Best tips to write as you speak:

Till now I just explained to you what is the conversational style of writing. But you may have questions in your mind like how to write in that style? or Are there any tips and tricks to write like that?

If you had any one of these questions or questions related to this. You are an action taker.

Now, let me explain the answer to your questions.

Yes, some techniques will be useful to write like you speak.

• Direct of expression:

Use more of ‘You’ than pronouns like I or we, because if you write like, “I did this” or “we did that”. It looks like you are giving a speech about yourself. No one will like you when you speak more about yourself. That bragging and no one likes it. They won’t listen. Why should they?

Will you read this article, if I keep on saying about myself How great I was? and the great things I did.

No, right? You may hate me if I do that.

I don’t need you to hate me.

So, direct the expressions towards your reader to gain their attention. You have to write about them, you have to add value to them. Only when you talk about your reader or your audience, they will listen to you, or else they will simply ignore you.

So try to use the word “You”. It will make them feel like you are directly talking to them. And only to them.

And when one tries to write for many people, it won’t work because it won’t look conversational or personal. So, you should write for only one person (Your buyer persona). Imagine a person sitting in front of you and you are writing as you speak with that person.

• Simplicity of words

The next one will be the simplicity of the words you choose.

Not all your readers did Ph.D. in literature or English. Most people (including me) don’t know the meaning of most words that are complex or difficult. These complex words will distract your readers to google that word’s meanings. A good piece of content will take you through the last line of the article without any distractions or deviation.

In fact, according to Gray Vee, your content should be as simple as the least educated person of your audience should understand what you try to convey.

Don’t try to play a words game here and win over your audience. You should make them win. So, try to use simple words that you use often when you speak or talk. That will make your content more conversational.

• Variety of music

Words are auditory, they will create sound in your mind when you read.

They will form a piece of music. This music depends on the number of words you use in each sentence. There will be variations in music when you vary the number of words.

Music will be nice to hear when you have variations in it.

When you speak, you don’t use the same number of words in all the sentences, you will vary the number of words. So when you write also, you shouldn’t use the same number of words in each sentence.

Don’t try to use the same number of words in all the sentences, try to vary them. It will be nice to hear when reading it.

For example, read the below sentences from Gary Provost’s book “100 ways to improve your writing“.

As Gary Provost said, Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. It should be nice to hear when they read.

• Activeness of voice

Use sentences with an active voice more than a passive voice.

Because Active voice incites a specific action when you read and you’ll know a stronger sense of what is happening.

When you use active voice, the subject is the doer of the action. In passive voice, the subject is the receiver of the action.

For example: “You took the ball” This is in active voice, and here the subject “You” is the doer of the Action. “The ball was taken by you” This is a passive sentence. And here the subject “Ball” is the receiver of the action.

When you shift from the active voice to the passive voice, you are shifting the importance of the actions to the subject. In our case, readers are the subject, and actions should be an important part of the content. So we should keep the sentences in the active voice only.

While you are writing content, in most cases, your audience will be your subject, and you may ask them to do some specific actions. So, in this case, there is only one reader, so the actions are the area where you should focus more, for that you have to use active voice only.

For example, Robin picked the phone, this is an active voice sentence. The phone was picked by Robin, this is the passive one. Here you can see that the importance of the phone (action/object) is shifted towards the robin (which person picked the phone).

Moreover, Active voice sentences are shorter than passive voice sentences and Active voice sentences deliver the thoughts more directly. No need to twist your audiences.

So, try active voice in most cases to keep the importance of the actions than the subject or objects.

And the last, the 5th point,

• Brevity of sentence

Keep your sentences in the correct length, it should not be too short or too long. Sentences with more than 20 words are generally ignored by the readers or they have to read those sentences more than one time to get the essence of those sentences.

Imagine when someone speaks with you in a single word or he is speaking nonstop. How do you feel?

Irritated, right?

Same with the writing also, when you write with single word sentences or sentences with a lot of words, you readers are going to get irritated. As a writer, you have to make your readers read your content easily.

Of course, you can vary the length of the sentences then and there, but don’t use very short sentences throughout the content.

Bonus tip for the readers

Before you read any blog post or book, try to watch any video by the author. This will help you feel like that person himself is speaking to you when you read their blogs or books.

Isn’t that great? You will feel like directly listening to the author across space and time.

Key Takeaways:

In this article, you should have understood what is conversational writing style is with the examples. And you have learned how to write such a conversational style from the 5 tips

1. Direct the expression to your audiences. Use more of “YOU” than you.
2. Use simpler words rather than complex or difficult words.
3. Vary the length of the sentences to vary the music, which will please the reader’s mind.
4. Use more active voice rather than passive voice.
5. Don’t use too short or too long sentences.

I hope this article helped you to understand the conversational style of writing. And now you can start your writing practice with these steps. All the best.

This is content inspired the Gary Provost book: 100 ways to improve your writing

For more such tips and tricks, Connect with me on my LinkedIn profile – Sasi Ram, where I post tips like this every weekday.

Cheers,

Sasi Ram

Articles that can help you:

• Practice these tips, and you will master the conversational style of writing and you will notice the great results from your writing over some time. Once you started writing in this style, your next step could be to learn SEO and Write with some basic SEO optimizations, your article can rank higher and attract more traffic to your content.
• The next step after writing a great piece of content is Marketing that content to the world. here are the tips to have killing content marketing strategies.
• If you are new to the content writing field, Check this amazing article on writing amazing content as a beginner from Jhanvi shah.