Write It The Way You’d Say It

Some of the most compelling people I work with have a better writer inside them than the one who shows up on the page.

I noticed it first in a meeting. A leader I was working with had spent twenty minutes explaining an idea to the room, and it was electric. Specific, funny, completely relatable and everyone leaned in. Afterwards I asked him to write it up so we could connect his influence through his social audience and what came back was three flat paragraphs I could have found on any company blog. The person had vanished from his own idea.

Nothing had gone wrong with his thinking. He’d simply changed voices. Somewhere he’d picked up the belief that writing makes a thing official, and that being official means leaving out whatever made him worth listening to in the first place.

What gets left behind

In that official mode, the specific gets smoothed into the general and the sharp gets softened into the serious. The professional register feels safer, and it quietly rounds the edges off the person until what’s left is careful, competent and easy to forget. The instinct is understandable. Spoken words evaporate. Written ones sit there to be judged, so people put on armour, and the armour is the problem.

The voice you trust least is usually the best one

Most of my job is giving people permission to use it. Permission to keep the offhand remark that made it click. To use the plain word instead of the impressive one. To make the claim straight, instead of padding it until it’s safe. The voice that works in the room was never too casual for the page. It was the thing the page was missing.

Why it matters

This isn’t about writing. A leader’s influence doesn’t grow because their prose got tidier. It grows because people finally meet the person behind the position and decide they’re worth following. The gap between a good idea and a moving one is almost always the distance between how you’d say it and how you let yourself write it. That way the reader stops getting a job title and starts getting you. That’s the moment your idea starts to travel.

Talking People builds communication systems for leaders whose ideas should be travelling further than they currently are.