Finding your written voice

Staring at a blinking curser and feeling completely at a loss? Don’t worry, you are in great company with almost anyone who has had to write anything, including some of our greatest writers. Some great tips to getting started are:

Just start writing

Stop worrying about the perfect beginning or the best form of words, just start. It doesn’t matter whether what you write to begin with is any good or not: that is what delete is for.

Begin with your structure

Some people work well with a stream-of-consciousness beginning and find the structure comes naturally as they progress - or they impose it afterwards. Many others are more structured thinkers and benefit from starting with an outline: beginning, middle and end, with a few key bullet points to flesh out under each. If you are working on a speech just starting with the hellos and populating the thank you at the end can get you off to a good start.

It’s good to be you

Don’t be afraid to be conversational in your writing. It makes what you say friendlier and more accessible, with the added benefit of a bit of personality. Giving examples from your own experience can be very effective in speeches, social media posts, and articles for a general readership.

It’s good to keep your written voice consistent with your spoken voice. Sure, writing is usually more formal than talking. But if the ‘written you’ sounds like a completely different human being to the ‘real life’ you, it is often less engaging, and may seem less authentic. And less authentic is less trustworthy, and less persuasive.

If you are a public figure, it is good for people to see consistency between your written and spoken personas because it indicates you are more likely to write your own material, or at least have a hand in it. And if someone else has written it for you and you have just said ‘ok’ how much have you engaged with it, and do you really mean it?

Imbuing some ‘you’ in writings from you can make all the difference.