Can Being a Good Conversationalist Improve Your Writing?

Monday, August 01, 2016 Expert Advice , Fun With Writing Center Staff , Writing Process No comments

As writers, one of the key things we need to consider is our audience. Who is reading our work, what do they know? What do they want to know? In order to enhance your writing and consider your audience, today we’ll talk about treating writing as a conversation.

Note that this is different than conversational tone. You want to have a very academic and formal conversation—but thinking of writing as a conversation with your esteemed audience can help you improve your reader’s experience—which will also improve the quality of your work and clarity of your ideas.

Imagine Your Audience

First, it helps to imagine your audience to know what type of conversation you’ll be having. A conversation with you and your mom would probably be different than one with you and an old friend and again different than one with you and a stranger. For most academic writing you want to consider your audience as someone you look up to in your field but haven’t met in person. Basically, you want to show off how smart you are to this audience a little bit—which will help you keep the appropriate tone. Remember, when imagining your audience, you’ll want to be:

Imagine Both Sides

The main difference between a written conversation and an in-person one is that the other person can’t talk back or ask questions or interrupt. So when writing as a conversation, it’s important to fill in the gaps where the other person might ask a question—you don’t want to leave a reader who can’t interrupt you with a lack of understanding or clarification, right? Because then at the end of your paper their question may still be unanswered.

Here’s an example of something that might happen in a real conversation:

You are speaking with a friend and discussing your weekend plans. Your friend suddenly says “Oh yes potato salad is my favorite”. You have no idea how they made that leap—so in the real conversation, you could ask them and they might say “Sorry! I was thinking of my favorite food to take on picnics. I like to picnic at the park you were just talking about”. The connection is there, but you couldn’t see it, right? Now imagine you couldn’t interrupt your friend for questions—you would be stuck wondering how potato salad connected to Riverside Park, and you’d never get an answer.

In imagining both sides, you do a few things in your writing:

A) You connect the dots—Lay out exactly what you mean and what the reader should take away from your source information. Is a percentage high or low on average? What does it mean? Make sure to fill these gaps. We have some great information and examples of how to employ this strategy on this page about using evidence

B) You are specific—It may seem perfectly clear to you that by “my organization” you mean Mercy Hospital, but your reader has no way of knowing that information , so be sure to specify whenever possible.

C) You explain why—Make sure you let a reader know why something is important. Don’t just say something needs to happen or knowledge is important—explain why so they have the same understanding as you do.

Imagine Yourself

Sometimes it can be helpful to imagine that you are writing instructions, directions, or explanations for your future self. Think about writing to yourself ten years from now, for example—you’ll have probably forgotten the exact research, ideas, and conclusions you had. So be really detailed in order to help your future self out! Your future self will likely have an advanced degree, so you still want to impress them with citations, insight, and scholarly tone.

With these tips in mind, you can use aspects of a conversation to enhance your audience’s comprehension of your work! Have comments, questions, or strategies to approaching your written work with your audience in mind? Let us know below!

Claire Helakoski is a Writing Instructor at the Walden Writing Center and holds an MFA in Creative Writing. She has taught writing and Composition as well as acted as a writer and editor in a variety of mediums. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and enjoys reading, writing creatively, and board games of all kinds