Conversational writing sells. Literally. However, what we learn in school makes what we need in the professional world counterintuitive. The professional world needs people to want to read, and it’s easier to read if the words “sound” like a conversation.
Here are some general rules to help you transition.
Conversational Writing is Natural for the Lazy Brain
I love science and complex ideas, but the mind is lazy. It naturally looks for short cuts. In this case, embrace the laziness–your clients won’t work to read.
First and foremost, visualize talking to your best friend. Our minds hear our friends and close family members more than we read content from strangers, so that’s what we gravitate to. Visualizing a friend will help you write in an energetic tone and keep you from getting too technical.
Keep it casual.
Word Length
Word length says so much about you, even if unintentionally.
Longer words can come off snobbish like a high school senior showing off SAT vocabulary. They seem elitist because only fellow chemical engineers know those words. Words may hog so much space on the page that I would have to direct you to my previous point about paragraphs.
Word length is a symptom of what kind of conversation you’re having. Don’t alienate people with your copy. Keep it casual. You’re talking to people from different backgrounds and desires. They don’t even have to listen to you.
Keep it casual. The appropriate word length will follow.
Sentence and Paragraph Length
Remember in school how we had to learn about simple, compound, and complex sentences?
Natural conversation mixes sentence types. However, compared to academic writing, we speak in shorter sentences. We keep our ideas simple. It’s easier to follow, and it’s visually easier to follow. Ask yourself if there’s a more direct way to word your ideas.
This applies to the paragraph level as well. Smaller chunks of text encourage momentum. Keep ideas to a few lines, hit enter, and keep going.
Visual Formatting
Conversational writing goes well with a presentation like an adult show-and-tell.
You may remember in school, many students would try to get away with as little reading as possible. Cliff Notes, skimming, asking a friend for the gist of things, reading the first paragraph every other page, and perhaps hundreds of other ways.
Working adults aren’t much better. It’s one thing to lie back on the couch with a tablet to read a fun book. It’s another to read undifferentiated blocks of text on a blog or landing page where plenty of sites take a more visually appealing approach:
- BIG, bold headlines and subheads
- bullet points
- photos
- infographics
- bold and italic and colored keywords
- whitespace
All of these break up the text. If someone wants to skim or don’t bother, they can skim.
Subheads can tell a whole story. Subheads can also be like a table of contents and attract someone to switch gears and read the paragraphs in between.
Sometimes the photos on the page tell the whole story. Bolded, italicized, and colored words add emphasis for a mind ready to wander. Bullet points along with subhead create whitespace, or mental breathing space, to make the reading journey less intimidating. Less intimidating than…a college thesis.
One Idea Per Page
The internet loves this.
One blog post on one page.
An “about” page.
A landing page.
Click on an Amazon item and open a unique page.
When speaking with a friend, you say your piece, they say your piece, and the cycle perpetuates. You don’t whip out an essay. Think of conversational writing as exchanging one turn in a conversation, where one turn is a page or a post.
Each page expresses one point. One idea. Or–
Yup, your reader just went elsewhere.
Personally, I always end up on YouTube…where every page I open provides knowledge or entertainment, and social interaction.
That’s tough competition.
This is practically opposite to a college paper or textbook. You can skip so many of those pages or forget so many ideas because there weren’t enough subheads to keep your attention, and just too much in one sitting.
Yet that is what we do at the computer on the internet. We complete a large number of tasks in one sitting or standing if we’re reading a tiny phone screen. Your reader might go back to living their life before they complete one page.
We can’t vouch for what someone is doing while reading, how invested they can be, or what kind of eyestrain they’ll face on their device.
That’s why writing has to be snappy. Get your idea out and put the next on a new page.
Conversational Writing Voice
This was like that. That happened because of this. Big words followed that. This was 40 percent and that was 60 percent.
Academia likes just the facts. Often with “was” and “is” to replace a distinct verb.
This style allows the writer to vanish. Maybe a robot wrote it. Perhaps in the business world, a corporation can be a single, faceless entity and write. This style benefits formal situations like research papers and business reports.
Not your marketing.
Especially not on the internet. Informality–humanity–trends on the internet. This makes visualizing a conversation with a friend even more important.
A conversational voice attracts readers–or viewers, on videos. People want to feel like there is a real person with some character behind the words. We’re preparing for when robots take over. We need to support humans and be cared for by humans. An exchange of humanity satisfies us.
Empathy–in the form of the writer’s tone, or voice–matters as much as practicality–the details you impart. At least, if you want to attract readers and supporters.
Conclusion
Simply, conversational writing is short, straight-forward, and broken up with purposeful formatting. Think of fancy, dreary college (heck, sometimes high school) papers and flip the rules.
| Do | Don’t |
| Short words Short paragraphs Homogeneous text Large blocks of text Many ideas, many pages Impersonal, robotic | Long words Long paragraphs Bold, italic, colored words Bullets, lists, subheads One idea per web page Personal, human |