The conversational form is a popular form within online learning to offer learning content.
By a conversational form, we mean presenting information in the form of a (fictional) dialogue.
The popularity of this form of work has a reason: the information changes from flat and matter-of-fact to practical, realistic and relatable.
But it also presents a challenge: writing out a conversation requires a different way of writing.
You have to get conversational language on paper.
But how?
In this blog, we share five tips for well-written conversational language.
Tip 1 – Reenact your conversation
“Had you heard? A colleague from HR clicked on a link in an email. Immediately blocked her entire computer.”
“Really, no ya! When?”
You probably recognize it: as soon as you start writing, you suddenly use much more formal words than if you were to speak the same message aloud. Long, cumbersome sentence structures pop up. You start using difficult words like “toward,” “regarding,” or “therefore. Or you suddenly choose “which” as your relative pronoun instead of “that” or “that. Now you shouldn’t be doing this anyway, but in a conversational form this is completely unrealistic. Fortunately, there is a simple trick to avoid this: speak your written text aloud. Or rather: replay the conversation with yourself. You will soon hear which words you would never say out loud. And thus which words make your text formal or unrealistic.
Tip 2 – Find words for word search
“I mean… You read every day in the newspaper about these kinds of emails. Then you know not to click on a link like that. Right? I honestly think it’s kind of eh…. stupid.”
“Well… Quite honestly… It was still quite er… convincing. I might fall for it too if I got an email like that. I… I wouldn’t dare put my hand in the fire for that, mind you.”
An important difference between written language and spoken language is the way they are created. A written text has a relatively long run-up: you think about your message, you start writing, you proofread it, you rewrite, you proofread it again and finally you have your text. With spoken text, this process is much shorter. You start talking and your brain thinks about the words that follow shortly after. This has consequences: you falter in your search for the right words. You “eeuht. You drop a silence. You pad your sentence to gain thinking time (“I mean […]” “Say it.” “Get it?”). You start a new sentence halfway through because you’ve thought of a better way to phrase it. All elements that make a conversation a conversation. And so should be reflected in your written-out conversation form.
Tip 3 – Dive into WhatsApp mode
“Pff, what now? Just wait and see? Or call in ICT anyway?”
“Hm, I don’t know either. Maybe call just to be sure?”
Ho! Hm! Pff! Poh! Ach! Haha! Ts! When we talk, we use a variety of sounds and noises in between to support our words. By doing so, we emphasize the emotion we are experiencing. In written texts, of course, we do not use these sounds and noises. With one important exception: WhatsApp. Just read back your WhatsApp conversations: suddenly the hmm’s and pff’s are flying around your ears in your written texts. By writing out such sounds in your conversational form, you create the illusion of a spoken story. Pooh!
Tip 4 – Interrupt the conversation
“Sorry, but I really don’t understand how you can fall for this […].”
“Well.”
“[…] all those misspellings, strange sender, that weird link. It was obviously fake.”
Two people in conversation often enough talk through each other. Your listener takes over your sentence. You correct your interlocutor mid-sentence. Or you drop an affirmative “yes” halfway through. Speaking fully without interruption is not always an option during a conversation. More often not than not. You can take advantage of that when writing out a conversational form. Have person B finish the sentence of person A. Or have person A briefly interrupt person B’s sentence before person B finishes it.
Tip 5 – Swallow it!
“ICT spoken yet?”
“Yeah, not very well.”
“My brother had it last year, too. Really sour.”
Those who talk are lazy. Or let’s frame it positively: efficient. We prefer to rattle off words or sentences while talking. For example, we swallow vowels to get to the point faster. After all, it’s nicer to talk when you can say “my backpack” instead of “my backpack. Thanks to the apostrophe, you can make this textual as well. It’s also easy to leave out words while talking. Surely “I think so” is a little more cumbersome to pronounce than “Think ‘t. Why waste time pronouncing “Let’s do it the way you just suggested” when you can just say “Is good. Grammar rules frequently go overboard here and auxiliary verbs disappear into thin air. And that’s totally fine in this case. For the conversational form, every language purist likes to make an exception.
Finally, leverage your audience analysis
The tips above can help you write out text as a persuasive conversational form. But of course, the context of your learning solution has a lot of influence on the words you ultimately choose. A conversation between two IT professionals will be different from one between two lawyers. Do you have the opportunity to engage with people in the target audience? Take advantage of that! What words do they use a lot? How do they build their sentences? It’s not the main purpose of your audience analysis, but it’s nice by-product as input for your conversational format.
About Ivo
Ivo Terpstra is Digital Learning Specialist at inBrain.
With his background in journalism and love for language, he is always looking for creative ways to communicate a story to the target audience in a clear way.
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