How do I write like I talk?

The standard advice — read your draft aloud, use contractions, shorten your sentences, imagine a friend across the table — all works, mildly. But notice what it’s doing: teaching your typing hands to impersonate your voice. There’s a more direct route. Your talking already sounds like you talk. Skip the impersonation and start with actual speech.

The reason your typed drafts come out stiff isn’t a skill gap. Typing is slow enough that your internal editor gets a veto on every sentence before it lands, and that editor learned English from school essays and corporate email. It swaps “figure out” for “ascertain” and staples three qualifiers to every claim. Speech moves too fast for the editor to intervene. That’s the entire trick, and it’s why the same person can be plodding in writing and vivid on a call.

So the workflow inverts: talk first, transcribe, then edit. Editing spoken words into clean prose keeps the voice and fixes the mess. The reverse (injecting voice into stiff prose) barely works at all.

The one real problem with talk-first drafting is that unprompted talking rambles. Three approaches to your point, hedges, no structure. You can edit that transcript manually, which is real work. Or you can have the structure imposed while you speak by answering questions instead of monologuing. When Xtraktr interviews you, each answer comes out short and shaped, because it’s answering something specific. The draft that comes back is built from those answers: your cadence, your phrasing, your actual way of explaining things — the voice your readers would recognize from your newsletter if you’ve been talking to them like a person all along.

Then edit lightly. Cut repetition, fix the seams, keep the sentence that sounds most like you even if a style guide would flag it. Especially then.