How to Make Personal Writing More Conversational
by Kathleen M.
There are a few tried and true ways to make personal writing sound more conversational, and less academic. This tonal change in your writing for application essays can be made with just a few easy changes.
The first thing to pay attention to is the audience. This is true in all kinds of writing but to make your writing more conversational, you have to imagine an audience who is interested in you.
When you are applying for something, remember that the people reading the application want to learn something about you. So sounding like you is an okay thing!
Next, avoid passive voice. This is true in most kinds of writing. But especially for application pieces because you want the readers to get of sense of you in motion, literally and figuratively! Work to express things you have done in a variety of active verbs and remove as much of the hedging as you can.
Add transitions to connect your ideas to one another. Again, this is something that will help all kinds of writing. But in application essays, the ideas sometimes need stronger connections to one another. The reason you are sharing one detail and the following detail may be clear in your head, but the reader will need the transition in order to connect the dots.
Replace writerly words. Sometimes, we think we need to sound smart or funny or (fill in an adjective here). You don’t need to, you should sound like you. So if you start feeling the need to rely on the thesaurus on your computer or desk too much, know that you should select the words that you know and have used before rather than select a word that you think sounds good.
The one piece of advice that has never worked for me is to write how I speak. My spoken vocabulary and written vocabulary are quite different. But you can make your writing more conversational by following the tips from above!
