By Contributor,Grace Aldridge Foster,Robert Alexander

Copyright forbes

JACKSONVILLE, OREGON – JUNE 19, 2019: A woman uses her laptop computer at an outdoor cafe in Jacksonville, Oregon. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
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I work with people all the time who sound completely different when they write and when they speak. A person who is perfectly pleasant in person opens up a new email window and instantly becomes formal, unfriendly, and robotic.

Most people feel uncomfortable with writing in general, which can make writing at work feel especially vulnerable. My students and clients tell me that it’s like all your flaws are laid out on the screen for someone else to scrutinize—you can’t hide, they say, and if you get something wrong, there’s a record of your mistake forever. The result? Embarrassment and mortification at best, misunderstandings and criticism at worst.

This anxiety results in a common impulse: to remove all personality from your writing and replace it with a certain kind of flat jargonese pervasive in corporate America. Writing this way feels like the safe choice, but it can be jarring and confusing for someone to encounter a very different you in writing than they encounter in person.

Tone is interpreted differently in written communication than in spoken communication

People interpret tone differently when they read versus when they listen to someone speak. According to Albert Mehrabian’s 7-38-55 rule, when you communicate verbally about something with an emotional element, including your likes or dislikes, the literal words you say account for only 7 percent of your message. Vocal intonation accounts for 38 percent, and body language for 55 percent.

This means that when there’s a mismatch between the words you say and the way you say them, people will believe the way you say them over the words themselves. Mehrabian concluded that congruence is the goal: for people to interpret your words and your intent correctly, the content needs to be consistent with your delivery.

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But delivery is difficult in writing. Without body language and facial expressions, it’s hard for your audience to interpret your tone. They can’t see you or hear you as you communicate, which means they have fewer clues to the intention behind your message. Add in our brains’ negativity bias, and people are likely to read your writing in a harsher tone than you intended.

Voice and tone impact your reputation beyond one single message

To create a cohesive, consistent reputation or brand, the experience people have with you from a distance or asynchronously should align with their face-to-face experience with you. This means that your writing—even if you don’t consider yourself a capital “W” Writer—is an essential part of the way others come to think about you, professionally. Your writing (whether via website copy, a professional bio, or an email) is, in some cases, the first impression you make on a new person.

And it could make a lasting impression, good or bad. With that in mind, it’s worth taking the time to identify your own authentic voice, so that you can communicate in that voice consistently and with confidence, feeling sure that the message you intend to convey is the one actually being received.

Below are three practical exercises for this exploration, to push you beyond determining “What facts do I want my audience to know?” to “How do I want them to feel about my words, and how do I want them to interpret my attitude toward them?”

Three exercises for strengthening and communicating your voice

1. Define how you’d like to come across (keeping in mind that you can’t 100% control this).

Consider your goals and your common audiences. Are you aiming to get promoted and mostly sending internal emails at work? Writing a newsletter for your business and hoping to convert your customers to a new monthly subscription program? Running for public office and trying to build trust with your future constituents? Looking for a new job and trying to establish yourself as a thought leader in your field?

Next, ask yourself, how would you like someone in your audience to describe you and your personality when you’re not present? Choose a few adjectives or phrases you hope they would use, and choose a few words that you hope they would not.

Optionally, fill in these blanks to solidify a strong personal voice statement that you can keep close by: “I am always [blank] and [blank]. I am never [blank] or [blank.] My audience of [colleagues/clients/potential employers] needs to find me [blank] and [blank].”

Use this statement to keep you focused when you write and edit.

2. Take up journaling.

Number one helped you define how you’d like to come across. But your voice needs to be authentic, not just aspirational. This means you need a good grasp on what your natural voice, when you’re not trying to sound a certain way, actually sounds like.

The best way to assess this is to determine how you sound when you’re talking only to yourself, which is why I recommend journaling: the practice of writing privately from yourself to yourself.

For this to work, you’ll have to stick with it. Most people, when they start journaling, imagine someone else reading their writing and adjust the way they write with an outside reader in mind. With time—even a few days in a row will make a difference—you’ll find yourself writing more easily and with less censorship.

Once you feel that’s happening, take a look at your personal writing and consider how close the voice is to the description you crafted in your personal voice statement. While no, the private writing you do for yourself isn’t meant to sound exactly like the writing you do professionally (my journal is full of curse words and sentence fragments!), this will help you gauge if the voice you planned is actually authentic to your real voice. It should be, for it to resonate with others, and for you to use it consistently.

3. Ask someone else—or AI.

How would people close to you describe your communication style and your voice? What adjectives would they use? Would a colleague, friend, or family member use any of the words you selected for your personal voice statement? Ask them!

If that makes you uncomfortable, you could ask ChatGPT instead. (Just be careful—the program isn’t confidential, so don’t share anything private.)

Here’s a prompt you could try:

Use 4 to 5 adjectives to analyze the tone in the following sample. Use a table format, in which one column includes the adjective, the second column offers a 2-sentence description of that tone, and the third column gives an example.

Whichever option you choose, the point is this: we’re not always very good at gauging our own voice. Getting an outside opinion helps you get a clearer view of how others might perceive you as a communicator.

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