{"id":23574,"date":"2020-05-12T12:37:53","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T16:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/?page_id=23574"},"modified":"2024-01-01T08:57:17","modified_gmt":"2024-01-01T12:57:17","slug":"conversational-business-writing","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/writing-tips\/what-is-readability\/conversational-writing-style\/conversational-business-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Quotes on conversational business writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

What writers & others say<\/h2>\n

\"Conversational

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\u201cGood writing is good conversation, only more so.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2015 Ernest Hemingway<\/h6>\n
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\u201cGet human! Stop trying to speak in a monolithic, generic voice. It\u2019s incredibly difficult to write that way, and it\u2019s even more excruciating to have to read that kind of content. Why make things so hard for yourself and your audience? Just write clearly, in human terms, and don\u2019t be afraid to display diversity and dissent. No one believes a monolithic voice, so it undermines your credibility.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Amy Gahran, media consultant<\/h6>\n
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“A writer’s voice is not character alone, it is not style alone; it is far more. A writer’s voice line the stroke of an artist’s brush \u2014 is the thumbprint of her whole person \u2014 her idea, wit, humor, passions, rhythms.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Patricia Lee Gauch, author of children’s literature<\/h6>\n
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“The ear, not the eye, is the final editor.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, in Writing to Deadline<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“Effective writing has the illusion of speech without its bad habits. The reader hears a writer speaking to a reader. The writing should flow with grace, pace and clarity \u2014 not the way we speak but, better than that, the way we should speak.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, in Writing to Deadline<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cSome amount of personality (the \u2018author\u2019s voice\u2019) makes sites more attractive. Users don\u2019t like bland impersonal corporate sites.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jakob Nielsen<\/a>, \u201cking of usability,\u201d in Alertbox<\/a><\/h6>\n
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“I don\u2019t know the rules of grammar\u2026 If you\u2019re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 David Ogilvy, “the father of advertising”<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWriting, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Laurence Sterne, novelist and Anglican clergyman<\/h6>\n
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\u201cFor many websites, we simply plug in and play the bare technology. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Nick Usborne, consultant, User Interface Engineering<\/h6>\n
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“When I started reading my stories aloud for a living and I’d hear myself, I would think, ‘Good heavens, that needs to be pointed up,’ or ‘That should be out.’ Now, as I go to colleges to do readings, I have revised a lot of my early stories so that they read more succinctly. I wish I had learned early on what a good test reading aloud was.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Eudora Welty, American author<\/h6>\n
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“Good writers are visible just behind their words.”<\/h5>\n
\u2014\u00a0William Zinsser, author, On Writing Well<\/em><\/h6>\n
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“What I’m always looking for as an editor is a sentence that says something like ‘I’ll never forget the day when I …’ I think, ‘Aha! A person!'”<\/h5>\n
\u2014\u00a0William Zinsser, author, On Writing Well<\/em><\/h6>\n
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