I've noticed that there an interesting tendency that I often fall into when I write.

Take the post yesterday where I talked about recruiting people for user testing. I'm been involved in user testing at Google and have spent time learning about the topic through books and such, but I'm far from being an expert. All I know is that there were some approaches that helped me successfully run some user tests on my own. And yet, in the post, I take on this authoritative tone that implies that I'm some subject matter expert dishing out novel findings I've had from decades of experience.

The way I've labeled the writing that comes naturally to me and this expert-style writing is using a descriptive voice vs. a prescriptive voice. With the descriptive voice, I simply share what I've experienced and learned. With the prescriptive voice, I make the additional move to prescribe advice to some imaginary "you" based on my experience, and the tone shifts as a result.

Here's an example to illustrate the difference. Take this line from the conclusion of yesterday's post:

When you decide to get strangers to try out your product, make sure you take the time to be thoughtful about who you want testing your product.

That's a classic example of the prescriptive voice. It implies that I know exactly what I'm doing and that you should listen to my sage advice.

Here's the same statement using the descriptive voice instead:

Before getting strangers to try out my product, I found it really helpful to take the time to think about who I want testing my product.

For me, there's a stark difference in both the writing and reading experience when it comes to these two types of writing. The prescriptive voice feels much harder to write (a major reason why yesterday's post took a whole 3 hours to write despite not being that long), and I don't like how it can come off as arrogant or know-it-all. The descriptive voice is a lot easier to write because it takes the tone of "here's what worked for me. If you get something out of it, awesome". It also reads much more genuine and real to me.

Going forward, I'm going to pay more attention to when I start slipping into the prescriptive voice because my goal for writing isn't to give off the impression like I always know exactly what I'm doing and act like some expert — I just want to share my experience.

Update (Day 18)

The original post used the clunky terms "I-based writing" and "you-based writing". I realized a few days later that "descriptive voice" and "prescriptive voice" are much better terms and edited the post to use them.

<aside> 👋 You're reading Road to Ramen, where I think aloud and share everything I learn in exploring the question: Can I make a living building things I love?

by DK the Human (@dk_the_human)

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