Adjectives describe a voice. Decisions create one.
Short answer: Define your tone of voice as a short set of decisions, not a list of adjectives. Decide which words you use and which you never use, how long your sentences run, how formal you are and how you sound when something goes wrong. Write each decision down with a before and after example. A voice becomes recognizable when those decisions repeat in every place people read you.
What is tone of voice?
Tone of voice is the way a brand sounds in writing and speech: the words it chooses, the rhythm of its sentences and the attitude behind them. Voice is the constant. Tone is how that voice adjusts to the moment. A good friend has one voice and many tones. They sound different at a wedding and at a funeral, and you still know it is them.
Why adjectives are not enough
Most voice guides open with three or four adjectives. Warm. Bold. Approachable. Expert. The trouble is that nearly every brand picks the same ones, and none of them tell a writer what to do on a Tuesday afternoon with a product description due.
"Warm" means exclamation marks to one writer and long, gentle sentences to another. Hand the same adjectives to three people and you get three brands. Adjectives describe the result you want. They do not produce it.
What a working voice guide contains
A voice guide that works is made of decisions a writer can follow:
- Vocabulary. The words you use, the words you avoid and one name for each of your products and services, used every time.
- Sentence shape. Short and declarative, or long and flowing. Contractions or none.
- Formality. How you address people, and whether you write as "we" or as the business name.
- Point of view. What you believe about your category, said plainly, so the writing has something to stand on.
- A never list. The phrases, clichés and claims that do not belong in your mouth.
- Tone shifts. How the voice changes for an apology, a delay, a sale or a celebration.
Show it, do not describe it
The most useful page in any voice guide is a set of before and after rewrites. Take a sentence the brand might plausibly write and show how it should sound.
Before: "We are passionate about delivering high quality solutions for all your needs."
After: "We fix commercial roofs in the Fraser Valley. Most jobs take a day."
The second version follows rules you can name: specific, short and checkable. A writer learns more from three of these pairs than from three pages of adjectives.
A simple example
Picture a hypothetical family bakery in the Lower Mainland. Its old guide said "friendly and authentic". Its menu, website and emails all sounded like different businesses.
The new guide makes five decisions. Call products by the names customers use at the counter. Keep sentences short. Name the mill and the farm when you know them. Never say "artisan". When an order is late, say sorry once, say why and say when. Nothing about the bakery changed except the decisions, and now the menu and the late order email sound like the same people.
Where voice gets lost
Voice rarely fails in the headline. It fails in the small print: order confirmations, error messages, invoices, out of office replies, the hold message on the phone line. These are written last, often by whoever is free, and read more often than any campaign. A brand that sounds considered in its ads and careless in its receipts is telling people which one is real.
Voice and trust
Consistency in voice does the same job as consistency in design. It makes a brand familiar, and familiarity reads as experience. Restraint in language is one of the quickest ways for a young brand to sound like it has been here a while.
What you say is a separate decision, covered in our piece on brand storytelling that does work. B2B firms will find the sameness problem in sharper form in the B2B brand messaging problem.
An eight question voice check
- Could a competitor publish this sentence without changing a word?
- Do we use the same name for each product or service everywhere?
- Is there a written list of words and phrases we never use?
- Does our guide include before and after examples, not just adjectives?
- Do our order emails and invoices sound like our website?
- Have we decided how we apologize?
- Would a new writer know what to cut?
- Read aloud, does it sound like a person you would trust?
If the answer to the first question is yes, the voice is not defined yet.
The principle
A voice is not what a brand says about itself. It is the set of choices it keeps making, sentence after sentence, until people know who is talking before they reach the name. Write the choices down, and keep making them.
Serif + Gold helps brands decide how they sound and then hold to it, from packaging copy to the smallest email. If your brand sounds like a different company in every channel, start a conversation at serifandgold.com.