How to Keep Your Blog Writing Natural

For any blogger, one of the biggest challenges is producing content that feels authentic and natural rather than stiff or forced. When your writing doesn’t flow smoothly, it not only makes for a less enjoyable reading experience, but it can hurt your credibility and ability to connect with your audience.

The good news is that writing in a natural, conversational style is a skill that can be developed with the right approach and techniques. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore various strategies to help you keep your blog writing sounding effortless, relatable, and true to your unique voice.

Let’s dive in!

Find Your Authentic Voice

The foundation of natural writing starts with tapping into your authentic voice. Your voice is the distinct personality and perspective that comes through in your words—it’s what makes your writing unmistakably yours.

To find your voice, get clear on why you’re blogging and who you’re writing for. What burning passion or expertise are you aiming to share? What does your ideal reader care about? Get specific about your motivations and audience, as this will shape the type of voice that will resonate.

Then, try a free-writing stream-of-consciousness style to get your raw thoughts flowing onto the page without overthinking. Don’t censor yourself—just write like you’d speak to a friend. This exercise can help uncover your natural communication patterns and vocabulary.

Loosen Up Your Writing

One of the main culprits of stiff, unnatural writing is getting bogged down trying to sound impressive or authoritative. When you write with a heavy hand, obsessing over perfect grammar and complex vocabulary, your prose can easily become stilted and lose its conversational ease.

The fix? Loosen up! Get okay with bending traditional writing rules in favor of a more relaxed style. Use contractions (“it’s” instead of “it is”). Employ colloquial phrases. Don’t be afraid of judicious profanity if that’s how you truly speak. Use incomplete sentences sparingly for emphasis.

By writing more like you’d actually talk, your words will instantly sound more natural and relatable. Just be sure not to take this too far—you still want your writing to be coherent and readable.

Invite the Reader In

Connecting with your reader is crucial for creating an engaging, natural-sounding blog. You’re not delivering a dry lecture or sermon; you’re having a friendly one-on-one chat. So invite your reader into the conversation by speaking directly to them using second-person language (“you,” “your,” etc.).

For example, rather than writing, “One should always proofread their blog posts,” which feels impersonal and detached, you could say, “You’ll want to proofread your blog posts carefully.” Using second-person instantly makes your writing feel more relatable and draws the reader in.

You can take this a step further by posing rhetorical questions to your readers, as if you’re having a back-and-forth dialogue with them. This helps create a sense of presence and rapport in your writing.

Use Sensory Details

One powerful way to give your writing extra texture and make it feel more authentic is by grounding it in sensory details and imagery. Rather than just relying on abstractions, incorporate vivid descriptions of how things smell, sound, look, taste, and feel.

For instance, instead of writing, “The beach was beautiful,” you could say something like, “With each step, my feet sank into the warm, powder-soft sand as the scent of ocean air and sunscreen washed over me.”

By appealing to multiple senses in this way, you make your writing richer, more immersive, and overall more natural-sounding. You’re showing your reader the scene rather than just telling them about it in broad strokes.

Get Personal

To form a deeper connection and cultivate a sense of trust with your audience, get personal! Share relevant personal stories, insights, and self-deprecating humor that makes you more human and multi-dimensional rather than just an anonymous, disembodied voice.

Don’t be afraid to weave in your own experiences, perspectives, and pet peeves in an organic way as they relate to your topic. These personal touches are little windows into your mind, allowing your reader to get to know the “real” you behind the writing. It makes your content feel more like a genuine dialogue between friends.

Of course, there’s a balance to strike in terms of how personal you get and which types of personal details you share. But overall, letting pieces of your personality and life shine through your writing will make your words sound infinitely more authentic and relatable.

Tell, Don’t Sell

An overly pushy, sales-y tone can be an instant put-off for many blog readers. When you come across as too self-promotional and product-pitchy, your writing will naturally start to sound more forced and inauthentic.

Rather than hard-selling, effective bloggers aim to share information from a place of authentic helpfulness. Focus your content first and foremost on telling an engaging story, offering advice and insights your readers will find genuinely useful, and establishing your expertise.

By leading with an educational and entertainment mindset rather than a sales mindset, your writing will have a much more natural, trustworthy flow. You can then strategically weave in soft calls-to-action and sales elements in a more subtle, non-pushy way.

Similar Read: How To Start A Blog: Detailed Blogging Guide

Imperfection Is Okay

When blog writing sounds a little too polished, overly structured, or completely devoid of flaws, it can inadvertently come across as inauthentic. In the pursuit of being grammatically perfect and having flawless flow, it’s easy for writing to lose some of its natural personality.

While you never want your writing to be an incoherent mess, allowing for some imperfections and rough edges can actually make it sound more realistic, organic, and ultimately more natural. For example:

• Leave in a judicious grammatical mistake or incomplete sentence every now and then (especially if it adds impact).
• Don’t be afraid of using slang and colloquialisms.
• Incorporate some fragmented thoughts, personal asides, and stream-of-consciousness style passages.

These intentional “imperfections” help mimic the flow of human speech patterns, preventing your writing from sounding too sterile or overthought.

Record Yourself Speaking

If you find yourself struggling to capture a conversational voice in your writing, try recording yourself speaking about your topic out loud and then transcribing that recording. There’s something about translating the spoken word to written text that makes it effortlessly sound more natural.

As an added benefit, having the recording in front of you while writing allows you to pick up on your unique:

• Figure of speech
• Verbal tics
• Preferred phrases and expressions
• Cadence and rhythm

Then you can deliberately weave those speech patterns into your writing, providing that realistic, just-spoken quality.

Read Out Loud

Another technique for achieving a more natural flow is reading your writing out loud as you go and listening carefully to it. When we read silently to ourselves, we tend to gloss over sentences and passages that may sound unnatural or clunky.

But hearing your own words out loud immediately exposes places where your writing sounds stilted, overly complex, or not conversational enough. It’s much easier to identify and fix those jarring moments.

Plus, reading aloud helps reinforce a more organic rhythm and momentum overall. It forces you to focus on crafting writing that has cadence similar to how you’d actually speak in a real discussion.

Study Natural Writers

In any discipline, studying those who exemplify a particular skill is a great way to improve at that skill yourself. The same goes for developing a natural writing voice.

Take note of prolific bloggers, authors, playwrights, podcasters, comedians, and others who are praised for their conversational, authentic communication styles. Really pay attention to how their writing mimics the natural flow of everyday speech:

• How do they structure sentences in a casual, colloquial way?
• What types of words, phrases, and bits of slang do they frequently use?
• How do they create a sense of back-and-forth rapport or establish a strong personal connection with the audience?
• How do they strategically incorporate personal stories and anecdotes?
• What specific dialogue or scene-setting tricks do they use to create that just-spoken vibe?

No need to plagiarize, but rather identify specific techniques that make their writing feel natural and conversational. Then start experimenting with adapting those methods and making them your own.

Write, Pause, Resume

Here’s a helpful hack that can instantly infuse your writing with a more natural, conversational quality: Break up your writing into multiple sittings.

Often, when we barrel through writing an entire blog post in a single sitting, it’s easy to slip into a sort of rigid, academic mindset where you stay laser-focused on getting all your thoughts out in a linear, polished way. But real conversation and stream-of-consciousness rarely happens in such an unbroken, overthought flow.

So for your next blog post, try this: Write a section of it, then take a break and step away for a while (a few hours or even a day). When you return to it with fresh eyes, your thought patterns will have been disrupted. You’ll be able to pick up where you left off with a renewed spontaneity and recursiveness that naturally mimics how one’s thoughts unspool in real conversational speech.

This write-pause-resume cycle introduces more fits and starts, tangents, and momentary loss of focus into your writing—all of which contributes to that realistic, unstudied cadence that is the hallmark of natural prose.

Conduct Interviews

Another excellent way to cultivate a more natural, conversational writing voice is by conducting interviews and incorporating excerpts or that interview footage into your blog posts.

Having a real back-and-forth verbal exchange with someone will automatically produce a transcript that sounds candid, unscripted, and fundamentally human—with all the charming false starts, verbal fumbles, and casual vernacular that entails.

You can use these interview snippets throughout your post to break up lengthier portions of more composed writing and continually re-immerse your reader in that informal, conversational flow.

Plus, interviews provide a great opportunity to further personalize your writing by introducing more perspectives and voices beyond just your own.

Study Verbal Idiosyncrasies

We all have our own set of unique verbal tics, figures of speech, colloquialisms, and other quirks that inadvertently make their way into our everyday conversations. When captured in writing, these idiosyncrasies instantly create a sense of authenticity and make the prose sound more natural.

So start paying attention to your own verbal idiosyncrasies:

• Words, phrases, or expressions you find yourself defaulting to often
• How you tend to structure certain types of sentences in a distinctive way
• Any speech disfluencies you frequently use (e.g. “like,” “ya know,” etc.)
• Your preferred analogies, metaphors, or figurative language

Then don’t be afraid to incorporate some of those true-to-you quirks into your writing. They’ll make your voice feel more genuine and recognizable, helping forge a more personal connection with your readers.

Of course, you’ll want to use these judiciously and avoid going totally overboard with them. But sprinkling in the right amount of your authentic verbal fingerprint can be an extremely powerful way to give your writing a natural, just-spoken quality.

Establish a Consistent Voice

While employing all of the above tips will help make individual blog posts sound natural, it’s also important to cultivate an overall consistent voice that spans your entire body of work if you want your blog to feel authentically you.

Your readers should be able to detect your unique communication style and persona in everything you write—be it short social media captions, newsletter blurbs, guest posts on other sites, or long-form pillar content for your blog.

This steadiness of voice breeds familiarity and lets your true, unmistakable identity shine through each time, rather than having your writing style sound erratic or all over the place.

So as you publish more and more, keep refining and reinforcing the specific elements that make up your natural voice, such as:

• Your preferred tone and attitude (irreverent, empathetic, authoritative, etc.)
• Types of words and grammatical structures you gravitate towards
• The ratio of personal anecdotes to formal teaching
• Your rhythm, pacing, and “musicality”
• Signature analogies and turns of phrase you tend to revisit

The more you can establish that strong, unified voice, the more effortlessly natural all of your self-expression will become.

Bonus Tip: Podcasting and Video

If creating more natural-sounding blog content is a real struggle for you, one shortcut could be to start a podcast or video channel! Basically anything spoken and recorded will automatically capture a conversational, just-talking feel.

Then you can go back and transcribe portions of your audio/video content and use those verbatim transcripts as a starting point for blog posts, adding some light editing as needed.

Not only does this allow you to harness the natural flow of the spoken word, but it prevents you from overthinking your writing since you’re essentially working off of a conversational first draft.

While this won’t be a sustainable process for every piece of content you publish, occasionally leveraging the inherent authenticity of recorded audio and video can be an excellent tool to keep your writing voice grounded in a conversational reality.

The Bottom Line

The key to sounding natural in your blog writing often comes down to finding simple ways to replicate the patterns, quirks, and overall feel of authentic human speech and interactions. By embracing a more relaxed, unvarnished approach and forging a connection with your readers, your writing develops the kind of candid, conversational quality that makes it so engaging and irresistibly readable.

So feel free to break some traditional writing rules, get a little vulnerable, and let your authentic personality shine. It’s that raw, imperfect realness that will ultimately allow your unique voice to ring through loud and clear.