The moment people sit down to write for their business, something stiffens. Plain speakers turn into brochures — 'leverage', 'solutions', 'seamless'. The result reads as corporate wallpaper, and corporate wallpaper doesn't sell to humans.
Say it out loud first
If you wouldn't say it to a friend across a table, don't write it. 'This helps you get paid faster' beats 'Our solution optimises your revenue workflow' because one sounds like a person and the other sounds like a press release nobody finishes.
Plain isn't unprofessional
Clear, warm, direct writing doesn't read as amateur — it reads as confident. The brands people trust most often sound the most human. Drop the armour and just talk.
Record the First Draft, Then Transcribe It
The quickest route to sounding like yourself is to stop typing and start speaking. Open the voice recorder on your phone, picture one real person — the customer who emailed you a question last Tuesday — and answer them out loud as if they were sitting across the table. Talk for two minutes, then transcribe what you said. The transcript will be untidy, but the cadence will be unmistakably yours, and cadence is the part that is almost impossible to manufacture at the keyboard.
Then edit for the eye rather than the ear. Speech repeats itself and wanders; writing shouldn't. If you said 'so the thing is, the thing about pricing is that people get nervous,' you keep 'people get nervous about pricing' and bin the rest. You are not publishing the recording — you are using it to catch a voice you already have, then trimming it into something that reads cleanly.
This works best on the parts that usually go stiff: introductions, explanations of how something works, anything where you feel yourself reaching for a formal register. Talk those out first and you skip the wooden draft entirely.
The Openers That Give You Away
Nobody speaks the way most posts begin. You would never walk up to a friend and announce, 'In this article I am going to discuss three things.' Yet that is exactly how the typing voice takes over. The fix is nearly always to delete your first paragraph — the real one, the one you actually meant, tends to be sitting in the second.
Watch for the small phrases that signal a throat being cleared rather than a point being made. They add length and subtract warmth, and cutting them almost never costs you any meaning.
- 'In this post I'll walk you through…' — just start walking
- 'It's important to note that…' — if it's important, it survives without the label
- 'At the end of the day' and 'when all is said and done'
- 'I just wanted to quickly…' — quickly do it, then
Casual Is Not the Same as Careless
Writing like you talk does not mean shipping your ums, your half-finished thoughts, or a wall of text with no full stops. Warmth is the thing you are keeping; sloppiness is not part of the deal. Read the final version aloud one more time — if you run out of breath before the full stop, the sentence is too long and wants splitting in two.
The tell that you have gone too far is when a reader has to re-read a line to work out who did what. A friendly line is still a clear line. 'We'll sort it, no worries' is conversational; 'so basically what happens is like the system it kind of does the refund thing' is just unfinished. Keep the first, rewrite the second.