How to give your writing the spark of life

Does your writing have personality? If you answer yes, then does it have enough?

If your writing has personality it will be more engaging and interesting. It will come across as more honest and trustworthy.

Not every form of writing needs to benefit from bags of personality. In a lot of serious news journalism, for example, objectivity is more important. In academic essays and exam papers, facts count for far more than personality.

But in letters, blogs, novels, even business reports, injecting some personality into your writing will almost certainly make it more successful.

So, where are you going to get this personality from? You could borrow someone else’s. You could copy somebody else’s style. But this is obviously not going to work for long (if at all).

Create a style and make it your own.

It’s clear the personality will have to come from you. You do have it, we all do. It doesn’t have to be a big, confident, outgoing personality either. Even if you’re quite diffident and insecure, that’s still something to build a style upon.

The thing is to create a style and make it your own. So that your writing has a voice which is all your own.

Fiction writers, of course, need to use different voices for particular projects, such as a novel, where they may be talking as a lead character in the book. Even as a blogger, you may need to do something similar. You may have a slightly different voice for different blogs you run.

But at the root of it all, it needs to come from within you.

(photo by SadJr on Flickr)

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Tagged as: Mindset, style, Writing