Do Not Write As You Speak

To write as you speak can be a great way to get your thoughts down. It can also be helpful in overcoming writer’s block. Many people swear by it as the best approach to writing. Their readers are seldom as happy, though. Indeed, writing as you speak can be a communication disaster. This article makes three arguments against writing as you speak and prescribes the qualities to look for in a professional wordsmith.

1. Good writing is economical.
Generally, we use many more words to express ourselves in spoken English than we do in written English. So, if you write as you speak, you probably demand more of your readers’ time and patience than necessary - while taking up more paper or screen space than necessary. Writing as you speak can be uneconomical and tempt your readers to skim.

2. Good writing is crafted for readers.
When we speak, we generally use inflections of voice, body language, and responses to listener feedback to help us communicate effectively. Yet, when you transcribe what you would say to a listener, you preserve the words only. Thus your message suffers information loss.

This information loss can make your writing more difficult for your readers to follow - especially those who do not know you well enough to imagine your characteristic voice inflections and body language as they read. Thus writing as you speak yields incomplete communication that leaves the reader to compensate for missing interpretive support. This can cause misunderstanding.

3. Good writing serves a diverse audience.
Your individuality affects the choices you make as a writer and the needs you have as a reader. This limits effectiveness as a writer in ways that only a self-aware expert wordsmith can reliably relieve.

When we speak, we reflect our individual cognitive (thinking and learning) tendency or style. The four basic cognitive styles are:

• abstract sequential.
• abstract random.
• concrete sequential.
• concrete random.

Thus, when you write as you speak, you have only a 25% chance of communicating effectively in sync with any given reader’s cognitive tendency or style. Writing as you speak would not serve best the majority of readers who do not share your cognitive tendency or style.

Not only does every person tend to one of these four basic cognitive styles but each of us also has other tendencies for processing information. For example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test indicates 16 different personality types.
The field of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) identifies and ranks four ways in which we process information:

• visual.
• kinesthetic.
• auditory.
• audio-digital.

NLP testing can reveal any writer's ranking of the four information processing styles, Myers-Briggs testing can identify any writer as having one of 16 personality types, and we all tend to prefer one of the four cognitive styles above. These are but three ways to identify how we choose to present information to others and how we prefer information presented to us. In short, every writer brings individual biases to his or her own writing.

Except for people who have the self-awareness that such testing provides and who pay attention to how their individuality affects their writing, these biases remain invisible to the writer. Because of these biases, the effectiveness of anybody's writing is limited - more or less limited with each reader according to how much or how little the reader shares the biases of the writer.

summary: A good writer accommodates the situation.
When you write to somebody who knows you well or who happens to be similar to you in how you process information, then writing as you speak could succeed like nothing else. However, when you need to communicate important information effectively, the odds are against you when you write as you speak.

A professional wordsmith who is not only self-aware but also knows how to write to accommodate diversity can avert the problems caused by individual bias and serve any audience. That writer ought to write economically with the awareness that words are the only means to communicate information in writing.

tip: Get a wordsmith who approaches writing as a skilled craft.
Don’t write as you speak or waste your precious time trying to write like a professional wordsmith. When you really need your audience to understand, have a professional wordsmith - an Articulate wordsmith - craft your message for you in sync with service to your whole audience.

- Glenn R Harrington
Articulate Consultants Inc.
www.articulate.ca