Piece #4: Style, Voice, and Tone
Your guide to consistent communication
Here's a fact: I am a professional writer.
Here's another fact: I've written for a lot of different organizations, businesses, individuals, brands, industries, niches, and a whole set of different audiences.
And another fact: My work would be so much easier if everyone I’d ever collaborated with had a clearly defined, well-documented content style guide.
However, even if there is no guide in place, a brand's voice inevitably shows itself. So, I get to a) ask my clients directly about their brand personality, or b) discover it myself by going through as much of their existing content as possible to get a good sense of it.
So, here's what I’m thinking: Every company that publishes any kind of content in any form should have a content style guide. It could be a basic one, it could be written on a single page to point out essentials, or it could be a detailed 100-page doc. Everyone should have it. It works best for large organizations, but it works just as well for smaller companies, too.
And why is this guide so important?
For starters, it helps your writers, editors, and content specialists to get on the same page.
It helps your C-level executives, mid-level managers, junior specialists, and upcoming experts to stay on the same page content-wise.
It also helps all your stakeholders, shareholders, and advisory boards to align with your content principles.
Plus, it helps your audience, community, and every single user to interact with you through clear and consistent content, and get the same look and feel from your brand, every single time.
Now, let's see… You can have style guides for the overall content, voice and tone, grammar and mechanics, inclusivity and accessibility, editorial, legal, and help docs, customer support comms, public relations, media comms, and more.
All that style may sound sexy, but the purpose of these guides isn't to be attractive. These are usually spreadsheets and documents stating clear definitions, relations, models, vocabularies, sets of rules, specifications, and explanations. Not so sexy now, huh? Think useful and helpful, instead.
So let's get down to them, shall we?
Content style guide
In a content style guide, you define the consistent voice of the organization and the tone you take on in specific situations. You also define writing style preferences, how to use different types of content, grammatical rules, vocabulary use, and more.
What is a content style guide actually for?
It serves as an internal document for your business.
Although some of the best-known style guides, like those from Mailchimp, Greenpeace, 18F, or Help Scout, are available online (with Mailchimp's and 18F's being also licensed as Creative Commons), you don't have to make it public.
It's for your own use.
It should be a helpful reference for your writers, editors, content creators, sales representatives, customer support managers, team leaders, product owners, stakeholders, and everyone else who's involved in content development and production.
What do you define within a content style guide?
It depends on your business, of course. Some of the assets to define may include:
How to write for your website
How to write UX copy and microcopy
How to write marketing materials
How to write press materials
How to write in the time of a brand-hurting crisis (or a global pandemic crisis, as a matter of fact)
How to write help documents
How to write legal documents
How to make legal documents more accessible and easily understandable
How to communicate with customers/users
Where, why, and how to use plain language
How to use voice-of-the-customer kind of a language
What language to use in official memos
What words not to use, not ever
What do specific words mean in your brand’s context
And I'm just touching the tip of the iceberg here.
It can be an all-in-one document or you can go with different documents for voice and tone guidelines, editorial, grammatical, accessibility guidelines, etc.
Voice guidelines
"Voice isn't some woo-woo, mystical feeling about the way that you write. Voice is a measurable component and you can break it down into three elements - vocabulary (level of words you are using), tone (emotions you are writing with), and cadence (sentence length and rhythm of your writing)."
– Justin Blackman
Justin Blackman from Pretty Fly Copy is the go-to guy for voice guides. He's been mastering the art of writing these guides for years, and he did it for more than 300 brands.
The Headline Project he did is a great example and a great writing exercise, too. He had written 100 headlines for 100 brands in 100 days, and you can read all about it here.
Justin's Brand Ventriloquist® framework and his WTF voice formula (Words, Tone, Frequency) is one of the simplest to follow. And you can listen to him talking with Bradley Morris in this episode of the Making Majic podcast to learn about the tools that he uses for checking the words, catching the tone, and composing the cadence in the copy.
Simply put, voice is the way you write and talk in order to articulate your brand character and personality.
So, when creating a voice guide, you can start with your brand personality.
Within my Discovery Worksheet (a document that I send to my new clients to learn more about their business, audience, and specific content needs), I always include these two questions:
If your brand was a celebrity, who would it be? And why? It can be more than one 😉
Choose Top 10 adjectives that describe your brand personality the best (a large list of adjectives included). Now, choose Top 3 out of those 10.
It's a great (and fun) way to get a grasp on a brand personality and voice.
And a celebrity answers might as well be some of these:
Arnold Schwarzenegger, for being strong, competitive, high-achiever, unbeatable, and a legend
Beyoncé, for being a fierce woman, inspirational, empowering, independent, and on top of the world
Oprah Winfrey, for being thoughtful, compassionate, generous, and kind
James Corden (you know, he's that guy from the Carpool Karaoke and The Late, Late Show), for being such a funny, witty, cool dude, so casual, friendly, and a great singer, too!
As you could've imagined, if you are a business owner, your own personality and personal voice are going to be woven into your brand personality. If you don't know what might be your personal voice, Dropbox has recently shared this Personal Voice Workbook within their Dropbox care package, so you can start there.
Important: For your brand voice, make sure to align it with your audience character, as well. The language you use should mirror the language your audience uses. So, ask yourself this: Who am I talking to? A voice would definitely be different for a teenagers' clothing brand than the one of a B2B company addressing CFOs of multinational corporations.
Tone guidelines
When writing, keep your audience in mind all the time. Always think about their mental and emotional state. That's what tone is all about.
You'll have a different expression when someone has successfully subscribed to your newsletter, when they've completed a checkout process successfully, or when they've upgraded from a free trial to a monthly subscription of your app.
The same way, your approach would be different when they've entered a wrong email address, or encountered a credit card problem during the checkout, or they've landed on your 404 page and have no idea how they've got there nor what to do next.
Sometimes, you'll want to be more direct, like you would in your CTA copy. So, you get to write "Buy now", "Get your free trial", "Subscribe", "Have a look", "Start exploring", or "Learn more".
Sometimes, you'd rather go with cheerful language, like you would in success messages. So, you can write "You're in", "You've made it", "You rock, thanks a million", "Woohoo, your order is on its way", if your brand voice is informal and playful.
Sometimes, though, you need to appear with compassion and sympathy, like you would in error or empty-state messages. So, you can write "Something doesn't feel right. Check your email address", "It seems like there is a problem. Please check your credit card number again", or "There is nothing on your list yet. Are you ready to start adding items?".
Facebook's UX writers Jasmine Probst and Susan Blue explain how they've come around different tonalities of the voice when talking to their users in different situations, having different mental states of users in mind. So, they've created a specific tone framework to express the spectrum of their tonality, ranging from celebratory to informative to sympathetic.
Furthermore, you can find voice and tone guidelines and a checklist in the Microcopy book by Kinneret Yifrah. Or, you can read the Medium post from Olivia Hilton to learn about "the skillful art of hedging and boosting your copy".
Accessibility guidelines
When writing for your website, it is so important to make your web pages accessible to everyone. It means that you shouldn't just write for the majority of your users, but for all the minorities, too.
It means that you should include all the edge-case scenarios and mind the people with visual and auditory impairments, people with physical injuries, people who are temporarily or permanently disabled to access your website, and people with all other forms of disability.
In other words, it means that you shouldn't go wild with your page titles; make them informative and easily understandable. It means you shouldn't put all your website videos on auto-play by default. Plus, you should always include captions in video content and transcripts for audio content.
For this purpose, you can follow the Writing for Web Accessibility guidelines from W3C. To make your writing understandable, you can also follow the Readability Guidelines, a universal content style guide, based on usability evidence, created by Sarah Richards and her team at Content Design London.
Important: Don't forget to make your style guide accessible itself. Always include a table of content at the beginning, with clickable links to different sections to make it easier for navigation.
Editorial guidelines
If you have a blog on your website, you can create a completely separate editorial style guide to help your existing and upcoming writers align with your writing requirements, expectations, rules, and regulations.
An editorial style guide can include many different assets. For example:
How to write a headline
How long should a headline be
What should an article outline include
What should the draft article look like (if you have a team of writers and an editor who is managing all them)
What is the minimum word count for blog posts
What are the minimum requirements in terms of quality
How to write subheadings
How to format articles
How should posts be structured
Whether or not to use contractions
Whether or not to use an informal language
Whether to write in first person singular (I, my, mine) or the first person plural (we, our, ours)
How to write image descriptions
How to write image Alt text
How to write article meta descriptions
And the list goes on…
I highly recommend having this kind of a guide if you accept guest posts on your blog, as well. That way, you will simply avoid repeating the same expectations over and over again. And you will save a ton of time for your editors.
Grammar, spelling, formatting...
Grammar is grammar. We all learn it in a grammar school, right? So, there is no need to point out general grammatical rules in your style guide or to teach your writers how to construct a sentence.
However, you can (and should) refer your writers to a specific style that you want to align your written content with. It could be AP, MLA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style, Guardian style guide, or anything else that you find appropriate for your brand. Following a single style reference would add up to the consistency.
Or, you can withdraw specific references that are important for you. For instance, it could be to define how to write dates, whether or not to use title case in headlines, subheadings, and CTA copy, whether or not to use the Oxford comma, and other specifics.
So, you can use your grammar guidelines to clearly state the use and the writing of:
Abbreviations
Acronyms
Contractions
Capitalization
Numbers
Date and time
Commas
Parenthesis
Dashes and hyphens
And more
When it comes to spelling, there seems to be an unwritten rule, and it goes like this: if you write for a global audience, write in American English.
Another useful advice for a global brand's content that will get translated into different languages is this: write localization-friendly copy. It means to think twice before using idioms and confusing words. It means a lot more than that, actually, and you can learn about it in this Writers of Silicon Valley podcast episode with Patrick Stafford and his guest Shayla Byrd, a UX writer at Google.
For formatting, make sure to make it clear when and how you use H1 heading (or the page title), and how and when you use H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 subheadings.
You can also add sections for paragraph and sentence length, numbered and bulleted lists, bold and italic text, writing of names, job titles, book titles, Latin phrases, and similar things.
And the bottom line is this: you get to choose how you write publicly available copy, content, articles, documents, policies, case studies, reports, and everything in between. But, whatever you choose, keep it consistent.
Consistency is key.
And again.
Consistency is key.
If you are not consistent with your style, voice, and tone, with your spelling, references, grammatical, and editorial guidelines, your audience will be confused. If they get confused and start receiving conflicting messages from you, you will lose their hard-earned trust. If you lose their trust, they will stop buying from you. It's as simple as that.
Read on
Discover your brand personality with this Brand Personality Quiz. After going through several questions with different statements, you'll get to know your brand archetypes and learn all about them. Mine are Sage, Lover, and Creator (and it seems pretty true to me 😊). I'd love to hear about your results in the comments below 😎
Not sure what adjectives would best describe your brand's voice? Take the How to Brand You quiz and find out about your adjectives and also your business archetype (here, mine gets to be The Ruler with a lot of playfulness). You can get a basic report for free or purchase a full report for $15. Plus, if you are a freelancer or an agency, there is an option to subscribe, create your own branded quiz, and start sending your clients a full report for free.
Take it a step further and connect your brand personality with UX writing through this Medium post from Djoelia van der Velden. As she says, your brand's voice has a big impact on how your users feel about your brand, so that would be a good reason why “you should aim to sound like a nice human being”.
Here's a case study by Manaal Oomerbhoy about shaping brand personality through UX writing. She shares insights into creating a personality of NinetyOne, an upcoming collaborative platform, and a workflow management tool for journalists, editors, and content creators.
Find a voice framework and learn how to drive engagement, conversions, and retention with words inside the Strategic writing for UX, a book by content strategist Torrey Podmajersky.
To learn more about creating a voice and tone strategy that addresses your customer needs and helps you build extraordinary customer relationships, go for the book Voice and Tone Strategy: Connecting with People through Content by John Caldwell.
I do believe everyone should have a content style guide. But if you are not sure about it, read this Medium post by UX writer Jason Fox on why it might not be for every organization. If you decide to go with it, Jason suggests going beyond vague statements like "have fun with your content" and "be friendly to customers". Plus, if you want to hear Jason’s elaboration of his thoughts behind the article, go to the Efficiently Effective podcast episode below 👇
Watch & Learn
Is your product team ready for exciting training? Check out the new, first-of-its-kind UX writing program from UX Writing Hub. It will give you four months of extensive training with personal mentors. You will learn the importance of a content style guide, how to create your company's voice and tone, how to increase engagement, conversions, and revenue through better copy, and so much more. It starts on May 25, 2020, and you'll get some great bonuses within the package as well 😉
If you want to focus more on the language you use, to think about it as a material, to see what would it mean to have a controlled vocabulary, and to dig deeper into the language territory, check out (or revisit) the Confab 2018 talk named Language: Your organization’s most important and least valued asset by an information architect Abby Covert.
Speaking of previous Confab videos (this year’s conference is coming up May 18-20, and it’s going to be all virtual), here is the Confab 2019 talk from Sarah Richards named Accessibility is usability. Dive deeper into the topic of accessibility and know that “accessibility is usability, usability is accessibility, and if you don’t have one, you don’t have the other one”.
Listen & Thrive
Here is Vitaly Friedman, a co-founder of Smashing Magazine, talking in the Katai Podcast with Robert Katai about the importance of having a website personality and not being afraid to do something different. He also talks about why content should lead the way within a web (re)design process, and so much more. And you know what? I had a chance to meet Vitaly in person and do the interview with him for a web design agency I was working for at the time. And I must say he is one of the most thoughtful web specialists I know 😊
Listen to the Efficiently Effective podcast episode to check whether or not you need a content style guide. The host Saskia Videler talks with UX writer Jason Fox about the misconception of the content style guides, and voice and tone definitions. His take on this: many content style guides are flawed. So, he shares tactics to improve the concept and the implementation. The episode is from 2018, but still so relevant today.
Oh, wow, I feel like these newsletters are getting longer and longer, but I enjoy every minute of writing them! And I'd love to hear your thoughts and feelings and feedback about it.
Are these too long for you, so you just think OMG, TL;DR, and quickly scroll to the end or escape immediately? Should I make them more bite-sized and more easily comprehensible? Or, do you enjoy diving deep into the subject matter and getting immersed in all these writings, insights, and resources? Let me know in the comments below or simply send me an email directly. Looking forward to hearing from y'all.
Stay stylish and write some darn good guides 😎
A big wave and support from me,
Nadja