Today’s topic is on finding your writing style or voice. I have a confession to make. I’m a horrible writer. Not that I can’t write, it just takes me a long time to do it. It takes me hours to put together a blog post. I can write 20 page proposals in less time than it takes me to write a 500 word blog post. I think it’s because I don’t like to share who I am. I prefer to share my knowledge. But I’m working on it, i fact I’m going to do my best not to delete anything in this post and just to write it.
I think the problem started when I was in school. Our English teachers taught us to write in the third person, but that doesn’t work in the new social media and blogging world. We expect to be able to get to know the people we follow. There are some that just lead with their knowledge but most of the successful bloggers / social media consultants let us into their lives to learn who they are.
My style will probably never be as open as someone like Chris Brogan or Mari Smith. That’s just not how I”m wired. I like my solitude and my privacy. I enjoy being out in the public and sharing information, but only once have I shared much about my past while on stage. I don’t hide where I’ve been and what’s happened in my life, but I feel we all need to walk out own paths and frankly like to leave my past in the past.
Now how can you find your voice? Here are a couple of things that I’ve done and I’m going to share one of the resources that helped me. Hopefully this will help you
Just hit Publish
One of the first things I was told was to just write and hit publish. That’s what I’m doing. It’s tough to do it, but I’ve been assured that it’s gets easier as you do more of it. Just like speaking. I remember when I was just out of high school and wanted to learn how to speak in public. I took the steps necessary to learn how to speak. You can read about it here.
The more I spoke in public the easier it became, where today I can get up in front of hundreds of people and deliver a talk without thinking about it.
Talk
Talk– this is advice I first received from, Paul Myers and more recently from David Preston. They both said if you have trouble writing don’t write talk. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a great tool to use. It takes some training to get it to work for you. I tend to do a lot of my work sitting in coffee shops so I haven’t used it as much as I should, but I agree that it’s a great tool to use and it is amazing how fast you can put an article together.
Read and Emulate
Read and emulate — this one is tough because what you want to do is find your own style, not try to become someone else. But if you are really struggling, just read other blogs and get some good ideas for content.
Tweet
I found Twitter helped me with my writing. You only have 140 characters, can’t do too much damage in 140 characters can you. 🙂 I guess even using chat would have helped. It’s easier to keep it conversational.
There are the things I tried and here’s the resource that I mentioned from Paul Myers. It’s free, nothing to buy, Paul’s that kind of guy. He just creates amazing content and freely shares it. Heck even when he sells stuff it’s usuallyonly $17-27. I’ve received more value and learned more about marketing reading his free newsletter than I’ve learned in $2,000 training courses. Sorry for the sales pitch. Once again there’s nothing to buy, download the guide and let me know what you think about it.
Let me know what you’ve done to help improve your writing too.