8. Don’t be afraid of humour. I just finished Gore Vidal’s autobiography, Point to Point Navigation, and it has a great gag in it. At a wedding, someone said to him, ‘I’m always a bridesmaid but never a bride.” He replied, “Always a godfather, but never a god.” Humour and politics separate us from the animals. Use it. Just be funny. 9. Embrace the exclamation mark. Yes, I know the grammar Nazis will come and take away my keyboard. But if you want to sound like a real person, you could give it a try. Go for it! 10. Use everyday metaphors. Ground your writing in familiar things. ‘It’s like...’ or ‘as if...’ 11. A sense of person, place or time. Include something biographical or descriptive that shows that the author is a real person. “I’m writing this at the kitchen table…” or “When I was at university…” The master of this kind of writing was Alistair Cooke. Somehow he managed to make the serious sound informal. It’s worth looking at (and listening to) some of his Letters from America. The conversational style works in business too. There are plenty of examples, but Virgin and Apple are two companies that do it particularly well. Today’s homework is 1) to find examples on the internet of companies that use the conversational style and to read through some copy and analyse how they achieve the effect, and 2) to take something from your own company or your own writing and rewrite it so that it’s more conversational.
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