Should You Write the Way You Speak?
Yes and no.
No first
Writing and speaking are totally different methods of communication. What works when we are speaking to each other doesn’t necessarily work when we are writing.
Because speech is accompanied by your entire body. We can see your face, hear your voice, see your posture and gestures, and get an overall feeling of your attitude and tone.
Writing doesn’t have any of that. It doesn’t have a body.
Where we usually look for signals from a person’s face, posture, and gestures, writing has to use formatting — font, color, white space. Where we usually listen for tone from a person’s voice, writing uses punctuation.
The tools to craft language are completely different when speaking and writing.
We hear writing in our heads through our own filters — what’s going on in our heads — rather than what the writer may have intended.
For that reason, it can be heard as more negative than things you would say to another person. We tend to believe things that are written down more than things said out loud, as if they have more power or authority because they have been written down.
So, while both speaking and writing use the same words and basic grammar structures from a…
