Write Like You

By Scott Hornstein

It is important that you be you, that the way you write and the voice you project is an accurate representation of who you are. That it sounds like you.

Your blog is one way your prospects and customers experience you. The subjects you chose, and how you write about them will illuminate more of you, and thus encourage customers and prospects to form a preference, if not a bond, to and with you.

A recent article in the New York Times is entitled, “We Learned to Write the Way We Talk”, which is accurate, fun to read and a rationale for writing blogs in a more informal and honest style, using “style” as the guardrails of comprehension.

Therefore, writing like you is an amalgamation of how you speak, how you text, how you chat, how you write formally and informally, your intellect and your irreverence. Add your emotion and personality by bending some rules to convey irony, humor and the occasional double-meaning.

Gretchen McCulloch, who wrote the NYT article, puts an important exclamation point to all of this:

In other words, we’ve been learning to write in ways that communicate our tone of voice, not just our mastery of rules. We’ve been learning to see writing not as a way of asserting our intellectual superiority, but as a way of listening to one another better. We’ve been learning to write not for power, but for love.