Conversational Writing: Write The Way You Talk To Liven Up Your Blog

This guest post was written by Mohsin. Mohsin is a blogger who writes tips, tricks, and articles on creating successful blogs over at Blogging Bits. He has also been a webmaster for three years and earns part-time income online. Check him out at Blogging Bits.

We live in the age of interaction. Everything we do from reading emails, listening to iPod, to talking on cell phones is a marvel of 21st century interaction design.

In the 21st century, it’s all about enhancing user experience by giving him more control over your product.

On blogs, you can enhance interaction with your readers by making everything as easy for them as possible. Although it’s a vast subject and would involve discussing the elements of design that are more interactive, right now I am talking about interacting with your readers by writing in a conversational tone.

When you write conversational posts, you write in a way that your readers listen to you and respond to you, and your writing ensures that you are interacting with your readers so they understand you without doing too much thinking.

Here are a few tricks to get you started writing just like that.

Imagine talking to a person

An old school trick but I am sure most of you don’t take it seriously, so I am repeating.

Imagine that you are talking to a person, or better still imagine that you are talking to an audience. If you do this, you don’t even have to force yourself to write conversationally, because you enter a different realm of imagination; you are no more writing, you are talking. Writing is what makes writing formal and formidable, and when you strip it of these features, it’s reduced to conversation.

Read out loud what you write

Go one step further, and actually say out loud what you are writing.

Here is my assurance: You’ll notice an amazing fluency of ideas and thoughts. You’ll be writing non-stop, and still wish to type even faster to keep up with the flow of ideas. After all, you can’t type as fast as you talk!

Moreover, you’ll say good-bye to the drabness that comes only with writing quietly.

Record your words

It’s even better to record your ideas before you write them. You don’t have to type or write anything down to distract you from interacting with your audience. You can turn on your recording software and start talking away as you normally would when talking to people in real life.

When you are done recording, start putting down your ramble on the notepad. And don’t worry if you have gone too informal, this is just a draft. Edit it as you like, and build upon it with previous two rules in mind.

Some people are natural conversationalists so they don’t have to worry about thinking of ways to write in plain language, but some of us aren’t. What’s good about writing in a conversational tone by using above techniques is that it makes you a good conversationalist too! You get to see your flaws as a speaker, as a talker, and as a conversationalist, and invariably take note of your shortcomings and improve them.

Over to you

What is it that helps you write in a conversational style? Is it anything other than above techniques? Please share them. I’d like to learn a few more tricks to get better at writing/talking.