Does your business communication sound like a human speaking?
It might be time to stop pretending that your business was built by some kind of brand entity without flaws.
If your website reads like a robot wrote it, no one is likely to “connect with your brand” in a meaningful way.
I read an article yesterday about how writing an audiobook changed a traditional fantasy novelist’s writing outlook. It really made me think about this in a different way.
Writing an audio-first story also had its challenges. “It makes you pay attention to things like dialogue where you really do want to make sure it sounds
reasonably like humans speaking,” Scalzi says. One of the changes he made was in how he used dialogue tags such as “he said / she said,” which work in written books but aren’t necessarily useful for a listener. “It sounds like a small thing, but when someone is speaking what you’re writing, those small things add up.”
Could speaking your copy out loud first be a better way to create it in the first place?
I know creating audio content has helped me out of writer’s block many times and it has helped me build an audience in my podcast.
I haven’t really gone in on it all the way though until recently though.
Lately, I’ve been writing a whole lot more like I speak because I’ve had a lot of practice speaking and cutting out filler words.
The practice I had in creating content with my voice might have made me a less terrible writer, or at least a more human sounding one.
Take a look at your website copy and read it aloud. Does it sound like it was written by a human? Does a voice or point of view come through?
So many business schools and PR departments teach smart people to turn their language into a robotic mess.
Take a cue from Scalzi (the writer) and write like you talk. I am trying to get better at this every day, ya know?
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13160550/writing-audiobook-john-scalzi-the-dispatcher-audible