More on Words That Sound Like You
A practical guide to finding your real voice in copy.
The most common question I get when I talk about voice-led copywriting is the practical one: how do I find my voice if I’ve spent years sounding like other people on the internet?
It’s a fair question. Most service providers have been trained out of their voice without realizing it. We read so much business advice, take so many courses, absorb so many “this is how you write a sales page” frameworks, that by the time we sit down to write our own copy, the voice that comes out isn’t ours. It’s an averaged-out version of everyone we’ve ever learned from.
The good news is that your real voice is still there. It hasn’t been erased. It’s just buried under a layer of borrowed phrasing and learned formulas. Excavating it is real work, but it’s possible.
Here’s how I do it:
Start with what you say when nobody’s grading you.
The fastest path to finding your voice is to capture how you talk when you’re not trying to sound professional. Get a voice memo app on your phone. Spend ten minutes describing what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters. Don’t script anything. Don’t try to be eloquent. Talk like you’d talk to a friend who genuinely wanted to know.
Then transcribe it.
You’ll find things you didn’t know you said. Specific words you reach for. Phrases you repeat. Metaphors that show up naturally. Particular ways you frame problems. The whole shape of your thinking, laid out in plain English.
That’s your voice. Not the polished version you write when you’re trying to sound like a business.
The raw transcript version.
Most people read their transcripts and immediately try to “fix” them. They cut the run-on sentences.
They smooth out the casualness. They make it “sound better.”
Don’t do that yet. The thing that feels rough in the transcript is often the thing that makes your voice yours. The casualness is information. The run-on sentences contain information. The way you hedge or repeat yourself is information.
Capture it before you correct it. The correcting happens later, and it should be light.
Notice the words you specifically don’t use.
Voice is shaped as much by absence as by presence. The words you avoid are part of your voice, too.
Words that make you cringe when other people use them. Phrases that feel like marketing-speak, no matter who says them. The instinctive recoil you have when you read certain copy is a signal. The words that make you cringe are not your words.
Make a list. Notice what you naturally avoid. Then check your own writing for those words. If you find yourself reaching for them, you’re not writing in your voice. You’re writing in someone else’s, the someone who taught you that those words make you sound professional.
Pay attention to your rhythm.
Voice isn’t just word choice. It’s pacing. Some people write in short sentences. Choppy. Direct.
Others write in long, looping constructions that fold back on themselves before landing the point. Both can be voice. The question is which is yours.
Read your transcript out loud. Notice where you naturally pause. Notice when your sentences run long versus when they snap short. Notice if you tend to build up to an idea or land on it immediately. These rhythmic patterns are some of the deepest markers of voice, and they’re harder to fake than vocabulary.
When I write, my sentences tend to vary in length. I’ll write three short ones in a row, then one long one that does most of the strategic work, then another short one to land it. That’s my rhythm. Yours will be different. The work is noticing yours, not copying mine.
Write the way you talk, then edit lightly.
The biggest mistake people make in trying to find their voice is editing too hard. They write a draft that sounds like them, then revise it into something that sounds like every other piece of business writing on the internet. By the third pass, the original voice is gone, replaced by what they think writing should sound like.
The opposite move usually serves better. Write the draft in your voice, then edit only for clarity. Fix the grammar. Tighten the verbose parts. Cut the repetitive lines. But leave the voice alone. The casualness, the specificity, the unexpected word choices, the way you frame things slightly differently than other people would: keep all of that.
The version that sounds most like you will almost always be the version that connects with readers.
Polish is overrated. Voice is everything.
One last thing.
If you’ve been writing in a borrowed voice for a long time, the real one will feel uncomfortable when you first hear it. It will sound too casual. Too personal. Too specific. You’ll want to clean it up.
Resist that. The discomfort is the signal that you’re getting close to something true.
The voice that feels slightly exposed is the one that lands. The voice that feels polished and safe is the one that gets lost in the scroll.
I write for people who care about the words because they are the strategic foundation of everything else. Your real voice, played back at the right volume, will do more for your business than any amount of design polish or marketing strategy. The trick is being willing to use it.
With care,
Saralyn
