Make Your Writing Stand Out To Build Your Brand
December 9, 2007
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Authors are very good at doing this. Think Douglas Coupland. If someone handed me a book with no cover or any indication of the author, I could pick out his style of writing. While some might say that it’s a problem if all of your writing is so similar that it immediately identifies you as the author, but when you’re trying to build a brand, then I don’t think it’s all that bad.
I think that a lot of people try to make each post as absolutely perfect as they can, and there’s nothing wrong with this, but if what’s coming out of your fingers doesn’t sound right in your head, then don’t write it that way. The best thing that you can do, in my opinion, is to write like you talk. Sounds simple, right? But if you were to carry a digital recorder around with you for a day, recording your whole day, I have a feeling that when you listen to it later on, you’ll find that you don’t speak the way that you think you do. Your brain will filter out the “uh’s” and such in your daily speech, so you don’t even realize that you’re doing it.
But if you tend to write the way that you naturally speak, your writing will come across as being very natural as well, and I think that it’s a rare person that can pull this off without investing a fair bit of work into it.
There are a few bloggers that I think have a very unique and easily identifiable writing style. Meg Fowler. Darren Barefoot. Robert Scoble. While I wouldn’t recommend copying any of these verbatim, trying to see the style that they have and trying to develop your own style can go a long way to improving your personal brand.
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December 9th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Totally agreed on this one. It is important to write like you speak. If you write in a very documentary type way, you might not get the response for your blog the way you want. Or the right people you want.
December 9th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Thanks for the comment, Justin. Nice to know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
December 10th, 2007 at 9:28 am
It’s funny to think of myself as someone with a distinctive voice, when I know I’m kind of erratic in my own brain. But I guess only I know how scrambled it all is in my head.
Meg’s last blog post..all i had was a camera phone…
December 10th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Heh. Isn’t that what everyone thinks of themselves, though? But believe me, you definitely have a distinct writing style. One that has at times resulted in me trying to clean diet Coke out of my keyboard and off my monitor.
Thanks for the comment, Meg. I really appreciate it.