How to Figure out Your Online Writing Style

Figuring out your online writing style is a key direction when creating a website. In fact, building a website from start to finish has a lot of key components to it: you need to choose a direction for the website that accurately represents yourself or your business, choose a style, customize the appearance and ensure it is user friendly, and create fabulous website copy. Personally, the writing phase is the most time or energy consuming, so I have come up with a preparation system that starts with deciding how to organize the website, and then choosing a Style. Choosing a Style and a voice gives me the necessary momentum to write for a client’s business. This post covers the following components to figuring out your online writing style: 

1. What is a Writing Style? 
2. How does it apply to a Website and other parts of the Digital World?
3. How do you determine and shape your Style? How do you recognize your own tendencies?
4. How does this prepare you for the Writing Phase of creating a website?

Current Summary of the Series

• The Simple Roadmap that I follow when I create websites for my clients. 
• Organizing Your Website – Ask yourself these 10 important questions before you start writing 

What is Writing Style?

At a personal level, Style is someone’s writing fingerprint. It is someone’s ticks, habits, word choice, voice and minor tendencies that show up in their writing that they just can’t ever shake off. As a business, a writing Style is the way they present themselves to the online and print world through their writing material in order to achieve the best possible outcome.

How do you Determine and Shape Your Style?

Imagine you are creating an online person or a personality for your business/organization. You choose how it’s going to walk and talk and dress around in public; you create a Style. Then you write it all down, creating a Style Guide. A Style Guide or determining a Style is going to be what helps you build the online version of your business/organization and decide your tone and voice, its vocabulary level, your audience (ie your customers!) and anything that might constrain you or your business/organization’s online content. Constraints are details that essentially box you in and tells you who your ideal customer is or is not, what kind of vocabulary can you use, and helps you determine if everyone will understand your words, or if your words are for only people in your industry. 

In most cases, you will want to choose a vocabulary level that is open for everyone because that is the best way to gain more customers. However, a professional example includes a website I created last year for a man who works exclusively in the hospitality and construction industries. He is a consulting representative for hospitality owners, franchises and corporations who are going to be renovating their hotels. A over-simplified explanation of his business is that he is a consulting representative that manages entire renovation projects from start to finish so that the hotel owners/managers only need to communicate with one person. His customers are only hotel owners and managers who are doing or going to do renovations; vocabulary is very specific to project management and construction related terms (again, something only a hotel owner or manager needs to know about), and the voice is clear, convincing and energetic. 

How to Figure Out Your Online Writing Style

Over time, you will recognize the things you like most about your writing habits, or maybe someone else will have to point it out to you. It took me a long time to recognize my own habits, and it mostly happens once you have someone going over your work (ie professors and mentors point out a lot in your writing). Reading your work multiple times before you show them to a client or even your audience, is very important. Try your very best to recognize repeating factors in your writing. Also, answering the questions listed below will help bring those ticks to light. 

How does Style Apply to a Website and the Online World?

Since Style is an organization’s representation of themselves (and the fingerprint of a writer), one must decided how their information is going to behave on the web page or blog post, social media post or marketing email. When I work with a client, I pay close attention to how they themselves present their information to me, and I adapt elements of their behavior in my writing. Since I primarily work with small businesses, it is especially important to me to show their personality, their values, and their passion in every single page. 

But I’m not just thinking about their personality when I start up the writing for their About and Services pages. I think about their customers. I think about how much is needed to be understood, how their services need to be clearly explained (in order to convince someone to choose them), and consider how little a customer might know about their industry. 

What are your passions, personality and values? And how is it going to show up in your writing?

Desktop Management really comes in handy when you’re working towards creating a Style for your business. If you didn’t read my last post Organizing Your Website, here is my definition: Desktop Management** is a rhetorical technique that describes a writer’s act and/or design to aid readers in remembering and prioritizing information that has been written in a text. To a certain extent, it is your responsibility to direct the reader to the most important information and manage how they remember the information. Ways of “managing your desktop” is by utilizing bolded or Italicizing, or underlined words (and picking how you do it and why), choosing which Headings work and where, choosing between number or bullet lists, and choosing which order you arrange the information on your blog posts and website pages. 

When I created the website for the consulting rep, I created a separate web page that discussed the benefits of working with them and utilized heading sections the most. I arranged the list of benefits in a priority list of High to Low, and in which order a project would be completed. Though all the benefits are important, the benefit of knowing that he is going to save you money by 20-30% is both most important and one of the first tasks that are accomplished in the renovation project. FF & E Procurement and Interior Design Management are the last things to happen. So Cost Saving & Accounting Transparency is listed first. 

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How is this Preparing You for the Writing Phase?

Remember: the key to content writing is to bridge the gap between business and customer through storytelling elements. Choosing a Style for your website/Online Presentation of your business will help guide your writing and it is best to start with guiding your writing. While I don’t believe in writer’s block, figuring out a Style before writing helps you gain and maintain momentum throughout the writing process. 

Figure Out Your Style

• Will your voice/tone be formal or informal? 
• Are your words going to sound energetic or serious? 
• Do you want your posts to be informative and clinical, or warm and inviting, and hopeful for engagement?
• Will your vocabulary be clinical, academic or be from everyday conversation?

Ready to start writing? Get started with my Figure Out Content Writing Workbook– $20 now

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** To paraphrase Janet Giltrow’s Academic Writing, pg 185