Write Like You Write

And not how you speak

Last week a friend said to me, “you don’t write like how you talk.”

He’s right, I don’t.

The classic rule is to write like you talk. But I think it’s lazy advice Twitter threadbois regurgitate without much thought.

The English language contains 171,476 words, of which we use about 3000 to handle our everyday interactions. If you stop to think about it, we’re only using 1.7% of all English words.

Writing like how you talk stops you from playing with spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, double meanings, abbreviations, layout, structuring, and rhythm. In conversation, the perfect word doesn’t always come to mind straight away. Whereas in writing, you have time to crack open a thesaurus and find different words to convey precisely what you mean.

I’m also not as well-spoken as I’d like to be. If I wrote like how I talked, half of this essay would be filled with umm’s, ahh’s, swear words, disjointed sentences and half-baked thoughts. Honestly, I would read like a dithering idiot.

Don’t get me wrong, writing like how you talk is not completely useless advice. Writing should mimic a conversation. You want your writing to have a sense of fluidity and warmth of a personal conversation.

In most conversations, I stretch my thoughts. In writing, I distil. When I attempt my first draft my ideas are incomplete. The first words I exhale are wrong. And I have to re-write sentences over and over again until it feels right. By the time it’s ready to publish, half the words I hacked out will have been cut from the final draft.

A lot of my writing principles come from the school of copywriting. Because of this, I write to be effective, not impressive. I write to be clear, not clever. I don’t optimise for the approval of academics or English literature snobs. But to resonate with my friends and family.

Writing, in general, is an awful medium for communication. A lot of communication is non-verbal. Your body language, intonation, facial expressions, and history provides context and fills in what is left unsaid. Writing like you talk doesn’t capture this. Often in writing, if you try to be sarcastic or witty and your audience doesn’t know you, it can be easily misinterpreted. You have to pretend to be a reader who knows nothing of what’s going in your head but only what you wrote. It means checking every sentence and repeatedly asking, “does this make sense,” until you’re blue in the face.

I was once told I have a soothing voice. Despite the kind words, I dislike my voice. I cringe and recoil in horror when I hear a recording of what I sound like. Yet the great thing about writing is that I can change my writing voice. When I write copy, it’s short and punchy. It jabs. Taps. Rhymes. And has an upbeat rhythm. Whereas when I write an essay, I often use long sentences to create a sense of urgency in the point I’m about to make, building up to a climatic crescendo, so that you feel what I’m about to say is important.

A few months ago, I noticed my speaking was beginning to resemble my writing. The act of tightening ideas and cutting fluff had trickled its way into how I articulate my thoughts in conversation. Of course, I still have a long way to go before I drop the umms and ahhs. My written voice and spoken voice will always have a strained relationship. They are hopeless lovers, bound by my body and cursed to never understand each other. But I won't deny writing does make people better speakers.

I'm going out on a limb here and assuming you spend most of your day writing emails, captions, tweets, text, instant messages and little notes. You probably write more than you talk. And that’s how we communicate these days. Learning how to write improves your connection with other people.

Writing like you speak is a good baseline to start from. Think of it as a nudge. A step towards greener pastures. Your writing should sound less like a conversation and more like a powerful unscripted monologue - where you're unleashing thoughts that have been on your mind for some time. It should flow in sequence and without effort.

So write better than you speak.

Write as you hope to speak.