I read a client's voice guide this week. It said: Clear. Ambitious. Candid. Warm.
Beautiful!
Now tell me how this is different from anybody else? How does it help me actually write? And how does it make you memorable?
This voice is a fortune cookie. It sounds nice, but it’s useless. And unlike a fortune cookie, your brand won’t become memorable just because you’re “warm and candid.”
In today's newsletter:
Here is the thing with a tone and voice guide: teams spend weeks creating it, turning it into a polished PDF, making a whole event out of presenting it…and then nobody wants to open that PDF again.
Ever wondered why?
Look. Here's how well-known companies describe their voice:
These descriptions read like every guy on a dating app describing himself as adventurous, easygoing, and funny.
If every brand has the same voice and tone guide, do you actually need one?
Sometimes you do.
The default way to communicate on the internet is friendly and informal. Nobody is aiming for unclear or unfriendly.
Writing "honest and clear" in your beautiful PDF tells a writer nothing they didn't already assume.
If your voice is out of the ordinary, your writer needs to know. That's when you need a voice guide.
Here are some examples:
Notice those examples all describe your voice? But what about tone? It won't stay the same at all times, no matter how hard your guide tries to make it. That's why..
Your voice and tone guide most likely says: We're warm and friendly, and we use a conversational tone of voice. Apparently, that means “let’s be buddies!” at all times. Now imagine a situation: The war in Ukraine starts. Your company wants to publicly stand with Ukraine and condemn Russia’s invasion. How do you want the message to sound? Friendly and warm or angry and uncompromising?
This is not the moment for “Hey everyone, this is really sad 💔 Let’s all hope for peace.”
You need a tone that drops the friendliness and speaks with conviction.
Tone doesn't hold still, it adapts. And adapting tone is the natural instinct of a good writer. You can't pre-script that in an if-this-then-that table.
So tone is off the table. And there's one more thing your guide is mistaking for voice.
A lot of the pain a voice guide claims to solve isn't a voice problem at all.
Two people on your team write "first" and "1st" differently.
One capitalises after a colon, one doesn't.
One starts sentences with "and," one thinks it's a crime.
That's worth fixing. But that's style. You can pick Associated Press Stylebook or Chicago Manual of Style, add a short list for the words you invented, such as your product names, and move on. You don't need to reinvent one from scratch and call it a voice and tone guide.
Style is solved. Tone adapts on its own. What's left is voice, but that part (as we've concluded a few paragraphs above) is worth writing down only when you're different. But most teams have no idea what that means for them. If you ask "how are you different," they'll reach for the same warm adjectives and end up back at the fortune cookie.
So don't start there. Start with the enemies.
What makes a voice guide worth opening twice?
Sarah Suzuki Harvard put it best in a post I saw on LinkedIn. A voice guide starts working, she says, the moment it names not just what you sound like, but what you refuse to sound like. The words you'd rather die than use. The joke you'd never make.
A real voice has enemies.
That's the part missing from every fortune-cookie guide. "Warm, clear, candid" has no enemies! But "we leave the occasional sentence fragment" has an enemy: the person who thinks every sentence needs a subject and a verb. That's why it's useful.
This is exactly how we build voice guides for clients. Every rule comes with its enemy attached:
The wrong example is the enemy. Put it right next to the rule and the abstract becomes obvious. Nobody has to interpret "be direct" and hope they got it right. They can see the sentence we'd never publish sitting next to the one we would.
You can pull them out of the people who have the voice.
We ran a LinkedIn program for a client where the goal was to create a LinkedIn strategy for their employees. To do that, we needed to extract each person's personal voice. So we interviewed them, then ran a calibration exercise: we wrote the same short post four times, each in a different voice and tone, and asked:
Which one sounds like you? And which words and sentences would you never say?
One person came back with this:
Many of the versions below have grammar that includes sentences that are not complete. This is an absolute no for me. I do not write in verbal tone, but rather follow AP style guide formatting. things I would absolutely never say: Can you believe it? Smart people, Sit on.
That comment did more for us than any adjective could.
That was for a personal voice, but the exercise works just as well for a company.
Here is how to decide.
Mailchimp's voice guide is more famous than Mailchimp. Makes you think.
Kateryna
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