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Please find our video script below for your reference:
Hi, everyone and welcome to Perfectly Planned Content’s new Writing Wednesday video series where we dive into the power of words and the many ways writing impacts your business. I’m Lauren Keller, Director of Content and Strategy at PPC, and I’m thrilled to bring you a monthly video series completely dedicated to the craft of writing.
Today, we are going to talk about a subject that business owners, corporate culture, and human behavior enthusiasts just can’t get enough of—personality. According to the BBC, there are nearly 2,500 different personality tests in the U.S alone. I’m sure all of you can remember a time where you took a Myers Briggs (shout out to my fellow INFJs) or Enneagram or one of the other two thousand tests out there.
Our fascination for more deeply understanding personality is quite moving because your personality is part of how you relate to yourself and the world around you. Your personality, in fact, has a good deal to do with your writing.
Today, I’m going to discuss three key ways your personality influences your writing.
- Helps you find your writing style
- Do you start to sweat if a sentence ends with a preposition, or squirm in your seat when one starts with a conjunction?
- Do you like to emphasize your point with bold, italics, or exclamation points?
- Your natural inclinations to adopt or reject these ideas speaks to your personality and more broadly, your communication preferences and style. That’s what writing is all about—expressing your ideas in a manner that encapsulates who you are. How can you do this?
- As you continue to write, you’ll see different moments where your personality shines through—the hint of irony in your openings, the lyrical bounce to your paragraphs, the succinct way you end your sentences.
- Our advice? Lean into this and don’t be afraid to let your personality shine. It’s a great way for you to authentically connect with your audience.
- There is a misconception, especially in finance, that blog writing needs to be a place of perfection, but an icy austere tone isn’t likely what’s going to connect best with your audience.
- Your audience wants to know you genuinely, so use your personality and your words to show them.
- Illuminates your writing habits (both good and bad)
- Some people (myself included) thrive on structure, whereas others prefer to see where life takes them. Both can both help and hinder your writing regime.
- While structure might help keep you on task, too much of it could close you off from new opportunities and creative ideas that should take priority.
- Too little structure can actually hurt your creativity because you might put off your writing until “inspiration strikes.”
- Trust me, if writers only wrote when they were inspired, we’d have far fewer complete works in the world (though a myriad of half-formed ideas to be sure)
- Know where you’re at and try to adopt a little bit of spontaneity or structure.
- Discover your attitude toward writing
- Do you look forward to your writing days each week, or dread the flickering cursor on your screen?
- Your personality can impact the way you approach and view your own writing.
- Perhaps you share your blogs with ease, or your perfectionist brain can’t allow you to press publish.
- Think about your current attitudes toward writing and how it impacts your performance once you actually put pen to paper, or more realistically finger to keyboard.
- You don’t want to hold yourself back, especially with writing.
- Take some time to think about how your own views and attitudes toward writing, impact it on a day to day basis.
As you can see, personality and writing go hand in hand, which shouldn’t be surprising because, after all, writing is one of the most personal forms of communication. We love getting to know our client’s personalities and how that shapes their business’ vision, values, and goals.
How are you going to let your personality shine in your next writing project? Let me know!
Thank you so much for joining me today. Until next time.
