With writing anything, voice is going to be critical. That all elusive writing voice that your English instructor in high school tried in vain to impart to you and your mates. The problem with this is that it’s super subtle, and it’s something that you can really hone, if you write a lot. Everybody’s got a writing voice; it’s just a matter of getting comfortable with the wring. And what’s super fundamental to this, more so than grammar, linguistics, or even a thorough vocabulary, is writing itself, or most cases nowadays, typing. You want to be as good with the medium as you possibly can get, so as to make that medium, sort of disappear. You want to be able to express yourself effortlessly; you want to eliminate as much of that friction as you possibly can. If you’re hunting and pecking, that’s just going to get in the way of your whole incubation process, and your ideas are just going keep evaporating from the top, like vapors off the top of an ice cube that’s just sitting out in the warmth. It really just takes practice; lots of it. Rote repetition is still the best way to absolutely ingrain something into you. Tools you can use to help improve your typing: there are free games you can seek out on the web; you can get back into intimate, long emails to friends (gives you a good excuse to reconnect in a real way, not the social media way), you can write yourself short stories, or keep a blog; that all accounts for some very substantial practice in not only typing, but also getting that voice out.
Okay, so once you’ve got that very fundamental thing down-typing-you can revisit the basics. We’re talking grammar; we’re talking diction, syntax, the whole nine-. And then again, back to practicing. Here’s a quick example of what you can do in terms of this sort of practice. Learn the conventional literary uses of the en dash, the em dash, and even the hyphen. Those are punctuation mechanics, and you can use them anywhere, anytime text is involved; they’re quite handy. You can use them chat, and you can learn the Windows Alt Codes for these dashes; the em dash for example is 0151.
Okay, so you learn a few new things, concepts and hard literary rules about diction, punctuation, etc. And then you dabble with your voice, in the same way that singers dabble with their voices; they’ll try to do a more soulful voice for example, or a hip hop, rapping sort of quick syncopated singing. As a copywriter, voice is everything. And what’s helpful, ironically enough, are visuals. When the Web Avengers hold lectures on this topic, what they emphasize is the fact that seemingly extraneous external factors do affect the product and content that you’re producing; again, the iceberg sort of theory. So when you’re putting together a voice for the first time, a deliberate voice that needs to hold a certain character, imagine that visual. If you need an authoritative voice, something along the lines of a CEO, you might think of a broad shouldered man, in a dark suit, strong lines about a hefty chin, silver hair perhaps, and a deep, sort of throaty, slow baritone when he speaks. Creating the visual, in your mind, that experience will carry through to your text, believe it or not.
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