Find your voice

- Okay, so let's start at the very beginning. You've got something to write, maybe it's an assignment, or maybe you just wanna start writing a blog. Have you ever had writer's block, like you just don't know quite where to start, how to begin and so on? Now, the way I'd look at this is, often when you can't start writing, the reason is because you don't have a clear idea about two things. One is, what's your actual intention? And the second thing is, who you're trying to say it to, who are you trying to get this intention across to? In other words, your audience. So, if you can get very clear in your own mind what your intent is and who your audience is, it's gonna break through a lot of what people call writer's block. So, let's look at the idea of intention. What is it that you actually want to achieve through this piece of writing? You should really try and nail that down. Let's say, for example, your intention is to persuade staff at your company to accept pay cuts without losing them and without them leaving the company. So, who are the audience in this case? So, the audience are kind of staff who are already, let's say, demoralized due to a badly handled and expensive restructuring, so let's say that's your audience. So, you now have a sort of an idea about who the audience is. So, put that intention and that audience together and what do you get? You get something like this. I want to persuade staff already demoralized due to a badly handled, expensive restructuring to accept pay cuts and not think of leaving. So, now our intention and our audience are clear, and an interesting thing happens when you get those two things very clear and that is that you suddenly know what to say and you also know how to say it. So, remember that, as soon as you get the intent and the audience together, the magic happens. You know what to say and how to say it. You get the content and you get the tone, what I call the tone. So, let's sort of see this in action. Let's say that's the scenario you're facing, that you wanna persuade these staff who are already demoralized and you wanna prevent them from leaving, but tell them about the pay cuts. Jot down six or seven things now that you might say in this communication, in this written communication, in order to achieve this objective. So, pause the video and just, sort of at this point, just say the kind of things you might wanna say. You don't have to write it in a beautiful way. Just sort of, here are the kind of things, the content that this would would lead to, once you got clear the intent and the audience. So, do that and then I'll tell you what I've got. Okay, here's some of the things I might say. First, I'd respectfully acknowledge the recent mess-up that's taken place in the company. I'd praise staff, maybe, for their patience and their tolerance. I'd reassure them that management is working overtime to fix these things. I'd explain how some temporary changes are needed to help get things on track and how this will involve some changes to pay, including possibly some salary cuts. And then, I might express hope that things will get back to normal shortly. And then I might thank them again and remind them how valued they are. So, because I was clear on the intent and the audience, it was able to give me what the content of what I should say, the limits of that content, and also, the tone in which I'll deliver that content. So, there you have your content and your tone, and it came from intent and a very acute audience sensibility, and this is gonna happen whenever you're writing anything. If you can clarify that intent and clarify that audience, and the more detail you can get into about that, the more specific you can be, you're not really gonna encounter this problem of writer's block, at least that's been the case for me. Here is an example of a clear intent and audience from an article that I saw by a journalist, a kind of left-wing journalist, a campaigning journalist, who was writing about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This guy's wanted in Sweden, apparently for some allegations of sexual misconduct, I think, and he has found refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and he's been there for a while. Now, put aside what you think of the argument, I'm not really getting into whether you agree with the article or not. We're not really thinking about that here. What I want you to do is focus on whether the writer has understood the intent or clarified the intent, clarified the audience, and then look at how that relates and leads to the content and also the tone of the writing. This is how this, John Pilger's article, began. The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism, and war. The persecution of Julian Assange must end. So, what do you think the intent and the audience is? And I believe that in order to write something of that kind of resonance, you do really have to know what your intent is and who your audience is. Now, here's how I gauge Pilger's intent here. His idea, his aim is to persuade politically conscious people on, perhaps, the left and right of politics that Assange doesn't deserve to be hunted down in the way that he has been. That's his intention in this piece of writing, and what tone has this lead to? Let's look at the tone of that piece of writing. When you look at it, it's indignant. It's basically coming from the position that the pursuit of Assange is unjust, it's a travesty, and this guy is extremely disturbed by this and indignant about it, and it's trying to persuade us that this is not a good thing. Now, it's this tone that really, and this awareness of the objective, the intent, and the audience, that has given life to this narrative. You see, you could take, all those points could've been made in a bland way, but because of that intent being there, strongly there, and the knowledge of the audience being strongly there, you have a narrative that has taken life. So, there's a very important thing that happens when you're clear on these things. Now, I'll just take a step back and I want you to be aware of the different kinds of intent that you can have when you're writing something in order to help you get clear what your intention is. Just think, you might be wanting to inform people of something, so your intent is informative. You might be trying to persuade, as in the Pilger example, you're trying to persuade people of something. Again, that's a strong intent. You might be trying to motivate people to do something. You may be trying to just entertain people through your writing, so that could be an intent that you could have clearly. You might be trying to inspire people. There are others, but you know, those are some of the main ones. And there's also many different types of audiences, so how would you get clear? You could be clear that you are speaking to the general public, let's say, okay, business people, if you're writing for a business newspaper. College and undergraduates, if you're writing some kind of newsletter at university or a newspaper there. Company staff, you could be writing for Americans in particular, you could be writing for the expatriate community within the UK, for example. You could be writing for left-wing people, liberals, you could be writing for conservatives. The idea is to tailor it very precisely and be very clear about that audience. Drill down into them, understand their values, understand their opinions, understand their basic worldview, their beliefs, their political views. And also things like their existing knowledge of the subject that you're talking about because here is all the fine-tuning that's just sensitizing you to who you're writing for and your communication, as a result, is going to be very precise and it's gonna hit. A good example of this is the State of Union address as the president of the United States makes frequently. The audience is Americans. The speechwriters there are paying very close attention to American values, American's view of themselves, American's worldview, their recent experiences that they've been through that have defined their experience as Americans, and they use this information about the audience, this sensitivity to the audience, in order to hit a nerve. And you're gonna hit the nerve the closer your perception is and your understanding is of the audience. Now, some people go into writing and they just have a very unclear idea. They don't get an acute sensitivity and that's why their writing does not hit. Now, the intent of the State of the Union address is often to persuade, as well, that the president's doing a good job and also to inspire a kind of a continued loyalty to the nation of America. So, all that intention is wrapped up in there and this is what's giving rise to the tone and to the content of that piece. Let's say you're writing for a national newspaper and you're trying to persuade the general public that torture by the state is always unacceptable, that could be your intention. Now, if you're gonna do that, you have to first acknowledge that audience's current feelings on the topic as you understand it, their existing sensibilities. You might wanna be convincing your English literature examiner that you really understand Pride and Prejudice and why it's such a great book. And so, you have the clear idea of where the examiner sits, their kind of perspective, what they're trying to look for, as well as your intention is to show them that you understand why this is such a great novel. So, these two things are very, very important and it give rise, as I said, to tone. And you can think about tone as coming across as, it tells you what your tone should be. Maybe, given those factors, your tone should be authoritative mainly or it should be witty or it should be chatty or it should be poignant or it should be grave. So, this is really the start of the writing process and I wanted to get that there because this is essential to kick-starting a narrative, is to really understand what your intention is and who your audience is. Always ask yourself that question before writing anything. You'll find that already some elements start to flow into your writing that will take it above being somehthing just bland and unappealing. The better you define it, the better the ideas will flow, the better the content will flow. And this is also where you begin to build an emotional connection with your audience. It also gives you something that I call pace because once you know the tone and who you're dealing with, you know where it's gonna be fast. You know your audience, say, is very busy, for example, a bunch of investors, and therefore, it starts to tell you, you need to be writing in a fast pace. One that doesn't quickly bore them and that might be monotonous, but it doesn't matter because that's the particular audience you're dealing with. So, you're gonna start to get an idea of what the pace should be. If you're writing, let's say, a stock report on a particular stock and trying to persuade investors to buy. You recognize that they're smart so you do have to be authoritative in the way you present it, but you also need to be fast about it. Whereas, if you're giving a funeral speech, a speech at a funeral, then your intention is to celebrate someone's life and give comfort to people who are there. You're very clear on that intent. Your audience is possibly a lot of recently bereaved people and so your content will be recollecting fond memories of this person. Your tone, what would that be? Deeply respectful, so you'd have to convey that tone. You'd now know that that's what you're doing and the pace would probably end up being unhurried, longer sentences than you would have in a stock market report. And so, I hope that's clear now. To get those two things clear is absolutely vital. Define them precisely and you're well on your way, and this is what we mean by you're beginning to find your voice. The voice comes from a clear understanding of these two things. So, now you've got that together, let's look at how to kick-start your narrative, how to sort of begin to get your content together.