Category: blog posts

Let’s Have a Conversation

~ Jack ~ Leave a comment

 

Placeholder ImageHas anyone ever told you that  you write like you talk? That’s a great thing to hear if they did. Indeed, it’s a compliment, because good writing carries with it a conversational, natural-sounding style, whereas poor writing is stilted and sounds forced. Stilted writing bores readers, whereas conversational writing pleases them, thus encouraging them to keep reading.

What is stilted writing?

1. Stilted writing sounds formal. It uses formal words instead of the everyday words most people use.

2. Stilted writing doesn’t use contractions.

   a. Stilted sentence: “I am sorry I was late.”

   b. More natural sentence: “I’m sorry I was late.”

3. Read your prose aloud. Better yet, read it into a voice recorder, then play back what you’ve read. Does it sound like natural conversation? If so, great! If not, more work needs to be done.

As writers, then, let’s aim for a conversational style. It should sound like we’re talking to readers from an easy chair, telling them a story. To achieve this requires lots of work and lots of practice. Here are a few tips that’ll help.

1. Use contractions. Why? Because people use contractions in their everyday speech.

2. Vary sentence lengths but be concise. Good writing makes every word count toward the reader’s understanding of a sentence no matter what the sentence’s length. If a word or phrase doesn’t contribute toward understanding a sentence’s meaning, if it’s just hanging out there serving no purpose, get rid of it.

3. Vary our sentence structures. Since sentence structure is beyond the scope of this post, I recommend finding and studying a good grammar book that discusses it.

Till next time, friends, keep on writing!

An Early Writing Lesson

~ Jack ~ 1 Comment

Many years ago, make that back in the early 1980s, I started taking my writing seriously after having a small article published in The Upper Room, a United Methodist devotional magazine. One of the early lessons I learned then was this: many folks either shrugged at my desire to become a writer, or thought I was lazy when I decided to launch out on my own and try my hand at it full-time. Fortunately, some of my early writing teachers had taught me to expect this reaction. Had it not been for their warnings, I might have become discouraged and quit. Writing, I discovered very quickly, is a lonely and hard business.

Blog Typewriter 2On the other hand, it had become such a passion that I gave up certain activities in order to pursue it. My biggest activity I gave up was my Saturday golf outings with friends. They didn’t understand. No one did. But that’s all right. The Lord has enabled me through all these years to “roll with the punches.”

I think one reason why the average person doesn’t understand the work involved is because when they see it in print, good writing looks easy. Oh, but quite the opposite is true. The easier a published work is to read, the harder its author worked. We writers can’t write well if we don’t work hard.

Don’t let naysayers discourage you from your calling. Our God is good, and He will bring your literary dreams to pass if you continue to believe Him and persist toward your goal.