Add your voice to your writing

Have you ever finished writing the first draft of an article, read it back and thought… ‘who wrote this?!?!?’

You’re not alone.

A common problem faced by new and experienced writers is that they feel the writing doesn’t contain their voice, their energy, their spirit. It wasn’t until I started to consistently edit my own work that it dawned on me how important it was to make your writing feel like yours. In my training as an agricultural scientist, I was very aware of how to write technically and scientifically, but then I started to write articles and blogs.

It was very difficult for me to incorporate good story telling and copywriting into my writing style because it was so stilted with technical language, detail and context.

Which is where I revisited advice from my year 7 English teacher and started applying the ‘So What?’ filter.

So What?

The ‘So What?’ filter, is an editing tool to help you parse out the fluff and complexity of your writing to get to the essence of your argument. In simple terms, as you are editing your work, read a line and say to yourself, ‘so what?’. What does this line add to the narrative? How does it progress the story? How does this increase the clarity of the argument for the reader. Anything that doesn’t pass the ‘So What?’ filter gets cut.

This is an important tool in my writing as I tend to add a level of floral abundance in an attempt to impress the reader with my intellect and vocabulary. In reality it does the opposite.

As the great Albert Einstein once said:

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

The same is true of your writing.

To make your writing sound more like you, don’t over think it, and add a ‘So What?’ filter.

Happy writing

-Sam