How Do the Writing Styles of Your Competitors Compare to Yours?

A serious nonfiction writer must have a view of his or her competitor's writing style. What does that mean? Your writing style is the flow of your writing which most accurately reflects your personality or voice. To explain a writer's writing style is a bit challenging because it is such an intangible thing, but in many ways you can get it if you just think personality.

When you read someone's writing on a subject, you get a feel for the person's attitude toward that subject. When you read his writings over time and over many subjects, the part of his writing that transcends attitude is his writing style. Sometimes you can understand the writer's personality after reading one of their writings, but you can almost always understand the writer's personality after reading a collection of their works.

If you were to read a set of writings by someone you had never met, and one day you had the opportunity to meet the writer, then you should be able to know how to talk with that person before meeting them if they have a well developed writing style. For example, in my own company I have a small group of writers and editors who handle the company's inflow of business. Each of those writers has a writing style that pretty accurately reflects their own individual personality. We have a professor, a university president, and an actor/comedian on staff. When reading the writings of the professor and the university president, there is a marked difference in style when compared to the writing style of the actor. Why? Simply put, their chosen professions are a reflection of their personalities just as is their writing styles.

If you read each of their writings side by side, you could pick out the actor without blinking. Why? You would be able to identify the fluidity of his personality, which was primarily developed in the process of and by the nature of his profession. Lining up the writings of these three professionals, you could easily pick out which one among them is the most talkative and which is the least talkative; which is the most conservative and the least conservative; which one will speak to you most straightforwardly and which will speak to you most diplomatically.

In the same way that you as the reader of these writers could identify these traits, your readers will discern your personality from your writing style as well. When looking at your competition, it is good to know how their writing styles differ from yours, where you are similar, and how you may overlap. When you know these things, then you know why your competitors are your competitors rather than your colleagues.

For example, in my own instance with the writers at our publishing house, each of our writers knows they are not competing with one another. Rather they are colleagues amongst themselves. Why and how do they know this? They were chosen to be part of our staff for the diversity they bring to what we can offer to our clients. The professor will be more technical, and she exclusively handles the company's white papers. The actor would struggle to write a white paper. Likewise, the university president has a business edge to him and would struggle if our client needed color or humor, whereas these characteristics are a natural for the actor.

When you look at your competition and their writing styles, you want to look at your similarities as well as your differences. You also need to understand what your client or editor is looking for in his end product. From these pieces of information, you can determine how to respond to your competitors or whether they are in fact colleagues instead of competitors.



What are your competitors charging? What are they paid?

For writers everywhere, the question of what they charge stands juxtaposed to what they are actually paid. Why is that? Simply stated, your competitors are everywhere. Anyone who knows the language can become your competitor if she or he decides to write.

So, when scoping out your competitors, you will want to find out both figures. What do they charge? What do their best clients pay them? There is always a gap between these two figures because a good writer will always write for a little less when she or he knows she or he will receive multiple assignments from the editor or client.

To give you an idea of what you should charge and what you should accept, consider these things in evaluating your own position:

• What is my education level?


• Am I writing to an audience at or below my own education level? If not, am I willing to research, research, research and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite?


• Is this my first writing assignment? My first year as a nonfiction writer?


• What can I point to when an editor or client asks for writing samples?


• How persuasive am I when presenting myself as a professional nonfiction writer?


• If I have never written professionally, then what do I have in my past that I can point to as a natural dovetail to this profession? For example, did I ever serve a company as an in-house ad writer, even just a couple of times, or without the official title? (Hint: Use it as an "old" work sample).

1. Generation X. The U.S. population born between 1961 and 1980[1].


2. Generation Y. The U.S. population born between 1981 and 2000.[2]


3. Baby Boomers. The U.S. population born between 1941 and 1960.


4. Writing style. The flow of the writing in a given manuscript.


5. Flow. Also known as cadence or smoothness.


6. Voice. The author's personality as reflected by the flow and writing style of the author.