Write like you talk. You’re a better writer than you let on.

Nice article, aside from the fact it should be proofread.

-MrDavidChan

I hate to nitpick, but it’s very difficult to not get distracted by the horrible punctuation and spelling.

-sneak

I want to share a a few things that have helped me be more creative, and more importantly more authentic, in my writing. I’ll address a couple of my vocal critics soon.

First, I’d like to share a story about a kid I met a little over a year ago.

I was volunteering for an organization here in Chicago where we helped high school kids prepare for their college applications. These kids were part of the program because they were usually the first in their families, often underprivileged, to be applying to college. We were there to help them through the college application process.

So there’s this one Saturday I met a student who wanted help writing and editing his college application essay.

We went over to the computer lab and he pulls up a draft he’s been struggling with. I read it. Thoroughly.

Uggh.

The essay is fine. It reads grammatically well.

But you could have told me a computer auto-generated it from some kind of high school transcript and I wouldn’t have doubted you for a second.

It was dry. It was uninteresting. It was soulless.

After reading it the first time, I doubt tomorrow you’d even remember a single detail.

Since I didn’t feel I understood him from the essay, I started asking him to tell me more about himself.

What came out of his mouth gave me chills.

I’m sitting in this computer lab. Mouth open. Goosebumps. My eyes are starting to tear.

This kid is frickin amazing.

He proceeded to tell me a story of how just 4 years ago he came to the United States, poor, with a single parent. Every single awesome thing I had going into high school, he didn’t have any of it.

But over the last 4 years, not only did he become an amazing student. He became a man for others. He was tutoring kids in math and leading programs to help other kids that were in very similar situations that he was in just 4 years ago. He was incredibly inspirational.

None of that came out in his essay.

“Don’t end sentences with prepositions.” “Don’t start sentences with conjugations.” “Sentences have subjects and predicates.”

When most of us write things, those are some of the many rules banging around in our minds.

And too often our writing comes across as stiff, formulaic, and unoriginal. It has no voice.

If I asked you to write me an essay about your day. It’s likely going to come out a a lot like my mentee’s.

But if we had an intimate conversation over coffee, the story about your day would be remarkably different.

You wouldn’t worry about how you conjugate verbs, or how to correctly contract “it is”.

If you were speaking to me, it wouldn’t matter. The words would just roll. Your struggles. Your achievements. Your thoughts would hit my ears before you start worrying about “oh man, did I just say goin instead of going? And is it it’s or its, I forget which one is possessive. Can I end a sentence with ‘at’?”

And because you aren’t worried about a hundred rules of grammar while you’re talking to me, I’m that much closer to your internal voice.

The voice that guides you through life every day. The voice that makes you unique. The voice that you find so easily when you’re talking to yourself in the shower.

But so often when we write, we pile up a ton of rules people have fed to us that need to be followed, and that makes it hard for that internal voice to break loose.

My first step with the student above was just to ask who he was, what he does, what he observes all day. And then I just typed what he said. A lot of it was run on sentences, and sentences without verbs. If he turned this draft in to his high school English teacher he’d have failed an assignment. But what was on that computer screen was his voice. And it was powerful stuff.

After it was now in front of us on a screen, we started editing it to fit grammatical rules that someone reading a college essay might expect. Which was a lot easier than staring at a blank screen with only those rules to guide us.

His essay became dramatically compelling. And it was so much closer to what you’d hear from him if you had an awesome conversation.

My critics are wrong about my lack of proofreading.

I proofread.

Dozens of times for a single blog post.

I’ll catch many of my homophone spelling errors. Not all because I make so friggin many of them. Believe me, I know the difference between their, they’re and there. And it’s and its.

As for the grammar. Usually, after proofreading, I tend to make it worse.

I’ll take a perfectly grammatical sentence and chop it to hell.

Because my goal isn’t to get an A in English class, or even please someone in a college admissions office.

My goal is for you to hear a bit what’s going on inside me. I want you to read my blog and recognize that it’s ME on these pages.

To do that, I try and give you words as I’d tell them to you if you were in front of my face. I drop my g’s constantly. I swear a lot. Especially when I have a cold. My thoughts can go pretty fast, then I stop. I pause. Then I realize I had another thought in that series so my next “sentence” starts with And. Or But.

Sometimes a single word is good enough for a sentence, or a whole paragraph. Because sometimes I like that drammatical pause.

Sometimes I make up words. But you’ll know what I mean when I say them.

You of course don’t have to mimic me to have any success in writing.

But if you do find yourself struggling to get who you are onto the page, start doing what I do, and just start writing like you talk.

Get it all on the page first. Then go back and make sure it flows like you’d actually say it. Read it out loud to yourself. You’ll know when you sound fake when you stutter a bit trying to read a sentence back.

When you finally have YOU on the page, now go back and make your bits bend to the style you want them in.

Me? I just leave it like I talk. It’s my personal blog after all. It’s just for me, and you, and this conversation we’re having.

And today, I don’t need an A in an English class.

P.S. I’d be incredibly honored if you followed me on Twitter, here.