A conversation is holding on tight to a partner as you go through your dance routine. It’s the truck stop where different minds meet despite knowing they’re probably catching a stomach bug. Talking helps us relate with each other, which has made it worth replicating on paper.
Start by finding your voice. Reflect on your charming speech by not sounding like someone you aren’t. Transcribing your verbal exchanges and writing aren’t the same, as there’s much fluff in everyday chatter. Be free of the chains of grammar until the editing phase.
We’ve unwittingly created gated communities in writing, and learning to write your talk can be used to break down those barriers. There’s much to learn in the illusive ways of conversational writing but stick with me, padawan. You’ll learn much more than the ropes: how to master this welcoming form of writing to knock the socks off your reader.
Realize What Conversation Is And What It’s Not
Heads up, I’m about to concuss you with our favorite saying from social sciences: we are social creatures. There. I hope that wasn’t criminal enough to put suspicion on my teller abilities with my hermit crab introverts.
On top of being dangerously close to being part of the catalog of cliches that induce pain whenever recalled, we also know that being social beings isn’t something that makes us unique. Many other animals share our desire for connection with their kind.
Our design is to search for a group to belong to and validate our experiences. This plight runs deep, but fundamentally we want something more than a mirror to reflect the world at and beyond our reach. Like me, you won’t be insulted by a warm voice reassuring you that you’re right where you should be.
Before I fixate on only a fraction of the artistic meaning we can uncover from a conversation; we need to be on the same page on one or two things: What is talking? Why does verbal communication seem more straightforward and flow more naturally than anything written?
Conversation is easy because it’s a group project. The task is easy because the weight is shared by at least one other person toward a common ground or achieving the same goal.
Even though you get the occasional slacker who prefers to ride the group’s coattails instead of pulling their weight, collaboration makes a conversation easy. You’re not alone in contributing to the topic because it’s a dialogue, a discussion.
On the other hand, writing is mostly a schizophrenic practice; a monologue, those long spiels by characters in a play that speaks passionately into the void gesturing furiously. To be born into conversational writing, you must begin by realizing that most of your writing is a monologue instead of a discourse.
So, the first step in transforming your writing into something that sounds more conversational is changing your relationship with your content and your reader. You and your readers have always been together with Scooby-Doo and Mystery Inc.
You had only forgotten that helping your reader solve a problem or unveil the unknown was your shared goal. You needed to be corrected into using the buddy system. Jinkies!
“You Don’t Want To Write As You Speak; You Just Need To Learn From Talk”
And now, with glazed eyes and a mechanical speech, you reply, “I don’t want to write as I speak; I just need to learn from the talk.” Good, gooood. Did you like my Jedi mind trick?
To the great annoyance of my editors and the few tweed-dressed and pipe-puffing scholars dissecting my writing, I allow my mind to tangent in my writing. I only do this sometimes, as it can get old quickly. But it’s a technique learned from everyday conversations.
Conversations are messy, with tangents, long pauses, unfinished thoughts, and one too many ums and ahs. Listening in on most of these everyday conversations will prove a torturous affair for many of us as the disjointedness and excruciatingly long silences aren’t aspects of the human connection we particularly want to recall.
The conversation is unpredictable, and this trick of allowing my writing (myself) to be suddenly hijacked and sidetracked into the random and often absurd mimics a bit of this unpredictability you’d usually see in dialogue with others.
As we’ll touch on later, pointers like this depend more on each person’s personality and the voice they wish to cultivate in their brand of writing. Only some people’s voices can use this chaotic way of writing as it can quickly appear like an unedited ramble or clownish makeup.
But when practiced and done with care and consideration, sacrificing a few of your precious sentences to relatable rants or living out your standup comedy fantasies can grant us a closer look at the heart of what you’re selling.
Plus, it can help keep you and the audience focused by breaking the humdrum of lengthy text. Good advice given to content writers is to break up their text with bulleted points, tables, pie charts, or whatever. That doesn’t really fly if you’re aiming for a friendly and chatty-sounding something.
When did your close neighbor or friend whoop up a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or end up with an It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Marc argument situation? Odds are, not very often. Unless you’ve got a “Howdily-doodily, neighborino!” Palm-to-the-chest gasp! Maybe I am the Ned Flanders?
In trying to omit as little as possible, I think my ADHD mind had already been naturally using this approach in writing before I learned that derailing my train of thought is good.
Quit Romanticizing Everyday Chit-Chat
One of the reasons that so many good writers are still insecure about their voice and tone in their written work is that they have a fictionalized idea of how they talk. I did, and sometimes still do, too.
Suppose you’ve been writing for a couple of months and posting your writing to more than two pairs of applause (parents, am I right?) without receiving feedback on losing people’s goldfish attention because of sounding robotic. In that case, your writing voice is alright.
Revisit the old work you’ve written and see if you have a consistent voice coming through. As with public speaking, your agent on the page will fluctuate and change somewhat as you find your feet. That’s normal; it’s even preferable.
Finding a voice that works for you and your audience can take many years. As earlier mentioned by this bodiless voice, you and I talk weirdly. It’d be awfully incoherent and boring to write how we talk.
With that recalled, what most of us look to find when we’re seeking the universal answer to how we can write in a more conversational tone is the small matter of—how can we make our writing read while being engaging?
Find Your Voice
I know, I know. That header sounds less like a gentle nudge toward the right direction and more like an end-of-the-rope statement. Therapists might currently be more of a buzzword than confessionals and priests. Still, lost people yearning for truth and stability remain the reason we write.
You can start keeping a journal or writing of some form over a couple of weeks to find out what’s inside that unknowable mind of yours. In keeping a written record of your innermost being, you should find that your conversational voice is the one you use to talk to yourself—the reading and thinking voice in your head.
Skip The Big Words
You don’t need to show us how perspicacious you are. Scientists and academics with healthy confidence know that they must explain their baffling concepts to a grade-schooler if they hope to convince themselves that they understand their subject matter thoroughly.
How often do you use these tongue-tripping words with your spouse or close friend? Scarcely, probably. The good conversations I’ve had involved drooling at the feet of the intelligent and hyper-aware that helped me answer some of life’s most pressing questions: where’s my sock mate?
Answer: it’s probably stuck inside the washing machine or stolen by fairies off my washing line. Both scenarios are equally likely.
You’ll also want to steer clear of using jargon and technical terms. What do you mean by “procurement logistics? Just tell me that you find the things that get things done. I still need to find out what you’re on about, but at least I’ll stick around past the appetizer.
“Why So Serious?”
Try not to take yourself so seriously. This is a challenging prompt to apply to my life and writing. I now understand that few people accept being laughed at without offense. I remember a period in my childhood when I made people laugh their loving hearts out.
The only dampener was that I would regularly feel that they laughed at me instead of with me. Like any other human at some point in life, I was a child simply trying to learn how to be human. We should all strive to be comfortable with coming across as a feather-brain.
Some well-known philosophers like Plato have long thought of laughter as part of the human experience. Learning to laugh at yourself frees you into the truth that we’re mostly all silly fleshly sacks. Those subtle differences are to be celebrated and given space to thrive.
Learning to bend the knee to our collective humanity more willingly can also free us to use grammar as the tool that it is instead of the immovable rail guard some people make it out to be. Sticking to syntax rules ensures clarity in your writing, but that should be something you consider in editing if it has yet to become an intrinsic part of your writing.
Learning the mechanisms that allow English to be impactful is necessary to communicate more effectively. You can only correctly evade and rebelliously break laws that you know.
Another reason to go over basic grammar rules is that it helps cut down on editing time. It’s not every day that I wake up looking forward to editing. Some day, I want to spend as little time reworking a piece that required too much of my attention during its writing process.
You’ll need this sense of fun about your writing to allow yourself to freely write the first draft without worrying about how it reads. Write your first draft without any grammatical convention, and get the facts in your voice.
Refrain from judging anything. Make it a goal for the first draft to be rubbish and leave your scrutiny for the editing phase of your writing. Every other draft after the first is used to edit and get your paper into its grammar bridges.
Pucker Up And Keep It Short Silly
As with using accessible and easily understandable language, you should also work to keep your sentences short. Short sentences improve readability. Long sentences can quickly become a “back in my day” ramble and lose the reader’s attention.
Keeping your sentences short also helps focus your writing. This also applies to the length of the paragraphs that you’re using. Again, you want to avoid ending up with walls of text that make your readers feel like they’re going through their Long Walk to Freedom.
We’re hoping for something more of a tango with the reader; we want to paint an image of a gap for them to add something to the discussion.
In this way, we’re staying clear of the idea that we are fighting to have their full attention as we bewitchingly recite to and for them the Declaration of Independence.
Another helpful tip is to mix simple and complex sentences into your writing. Make use of semi-colons, independent clauses with the same or dependent clauses, different types of conjunctions, colons, ellipses, and all.
You might not hear semi-colons and other apostrophes in writing. Still, they can serve a similar role to using your hands and gesturing while you speak to stress points or show excitement.
Knowing when to use different exclamation marks and boldening and italicizing can add a little pizzazz. Italics and bold are what we call typographical emphasis, as italics serve as a soft emphasis while bold is for a heavy emphasis on points.
Simple things like using contractions can immediately turn your writing more informal. There’s something about using “can’t” instead of “cannot” that sounds less absolute.
Feel free to use compound words, using dashes to connect words working together to say the same thing. Allllso, add extra letters to your words where some extra spice is appropriate—after all, it’s grammar open-season
Who’re You Talking To?
Before you even fire up those fastest-fingers-in-the-west, you’ll want to understand your target audience clearly. Knowing who you’re talking to should help guide your tone and make your writing sound more personal.
Once you zero in on the type of crowd that you’re writing to, picture a single person, imagine the person as one of your close friends with whom you can have a riot of a time and have a heartfelt discussion over a cold brew, tea, or cuppa joe.
Writing to a person you can see vividly in front of you can also help you gauge your tongue and allow you to read the room better. Sometimes conversations do call for some level of formality.
We don’t all laugh at the unbiased absurdity of life and want a shoulder to cry on. Only some people beaten by a situation want to pretend that it’s not as bad as it seems through our levity toward their specific predicament.
Even if it’s in your nature to try to keep the room light in the face of darkness, I sometimes want to hear that what I’ve gone through is terrible.
Each person’s existence at this moment means that the planets lined up at just the right moment and to unimaginable odds. But, you can still show your reader that their experience isn’t unique to them as we humans together.
Roll up your sleeves for your company and use personal anecdotes, reference things and media that you enjoy, and share the experiences that you’ve lived. Your writing should be more of a dance, a date, and less of the speaker at the square yelling to passers-by.
You can get friends and other people to read your writing to give feedback on whether your written voice properly represents your unique and real-life voice. Representation over direct copying is key as we aren’t especially interested in the nuances of your speech; we only want the essence.
Be A Curious Cat
Curiosity and questions are the backbones of a scientific noggin. We need to ask questions before we can know what we want. Before writing, we should jot down the whats and the whys.
Once we’ve written down a bunch of questions, we can start researching the topic. The research phase of your writing becomes more straightforward. You can retain information more because your mind is focused on finding the answer to your queries as you read through the material.
Similarly, use questions to get your reader involved in your writing. Instead of the reader feeling like they are being just fed information and kept at arm’s length, they feel included. I’m sure you noticed the questions I planted throughout the read. What did you think of them?
I might not be next to you to give a reply back, but I know that I got you to get involved deeper, even if momentarily.
Pronouns Matter
Pronouns are how I’ve been able to relate to you. By using ‘we,’ ‘you,’ and ‘I’ throughout the text, I was able to create a connection between us. The relationship we can make through the appropriate pronouns can bridge many gaps in our writing.
Quick-Fire Tips
There are many ways of conversational writing, but only a few matters. You should see a significant difference in your essay once you implement all the techniques we covered in the previous text. The goal is to find your voice by keeping what works and chucking the rest.
Just in case you chuck too many, here are some other ways to help you write more as you talk:
- Read your writing out loud to yourself. Reading out loud can help you determine where you sound robotic and which parts sound like a fun heart-to-heart with a friend.
- Record your conversation with different people. Recording and listening to conversations with people from all walks of life will help you find or develop a friendlier speaking pattern that you can use to transfer onto the page. Let’s not be creepy, ask before you record someone.
- Pull out your phone and record yourself talking about the topic you’re working on if you need help with which direction to take your writing. You can then transcribe some of the parts of your recording that are useful to break through the initial friction in writing. Leave out the filler words.
- Use your phone to write out your first draft. I write drafts in my notes app all the time, and it helps to remove the “Big Brother is watching” pressure from my writing.
- As you might have noticed, I regularly fall prey to the prowl of flowery language. As a recovering wordsmith, I’m here to guide you well clear of this type of writing. It’s fun for an occasional night out of burning rubber and escaping responsibilities. Like all good moments of reckless abandonment, it’ll often come back to haunt you upon sober review.
- Albeit sparingly, keeping an eye on and leaning toward growing trends can help make your voice sound more human. The finesse behind writing you can get from AI-generated content is growing terrifyingly good and more human.
- Whenever possible, be everyone’s friend and be a voice that could be talking with the little and big person behind the pixelated screen.
Conclusion
Conversational writing is an art because it can create a connection between two different people. This connection from writing in dialogue can help bond you and your audience. These small bonds will allow your voice to be heard by sounding like a friend or someone the reader would usually talk with.
