Tone of voice and a style guide

Tone of voice is the shade a writer’s steady voice takes in a given situation: formal or casual, serious or funny. A style guide fixes it with examples.

Voice and tone

When you write, you have a character: you are neat or carefree, serious or fond of a joke, you speak to people with respect or as equals. That character, steady and recognizable, is called a voice. But to different people and at different moments you speak differently: one way with a friend at a party, another with a stranger who has lost their papers. That is tone: a shade of the voice for a situation.

Nielsen Norman Group’s research says the same in its own way: tone is how we tell the reader what we feel about what we’re saying, and it affects how the reader feels about it. Tone is built of more than words: the length of sentences, the way you address the reader, punctuation and even the word order on a button all play a part.

From this follows something that is often missed: tone can’t be one for every occasion. The voice is steady, and the tone changes. An error message is more serious than a congratulation on a successful request. But both phrases should sound as if the same person said them.

Check yourself: how does voice differ from tone?

Voice is the author’s steady character. Tone is its shade in a given situation: more serious in an error, warmer in a success.

Four axes

Nielsen Norman Group tested on people what in a text changes the impression of tone, and found four axes. They aren’t categories but scales: any text sits somewhere between the ends.

1. Formal and casual. “To book, please complete the form” or “Leave your number, we’ll call”.
2. Serious and funny. Whether the author is trying to joke. (The researchers rated the attempt, not whether the joke worked.)
3. Respectful and irreverent. How the author treats the subject. Irreverence is usually aimed at the subject of the talk, such as the dull habits of an industry, not at the reader.
4. Matter-of-fact and enthusiastic. How much enthusiasm: “Consultation.” or “Great to meet you!”.

Move the sliders. The diagram holds three little texts: the line under the headline, a button and an error message. The facts in them are the same, and only the voice changes. The “Tone from my brief” button sets the sliders to the starting position of your tone.

formal casual

serious funny

respectful irreverent

matter-of-fact enthusiastic

Tone from my brief Position: 2 · 1 · 1 · 1

Under the headline

Consultation. To book, please fill in the form. We will contact you within one business day.

Button

Book a consultation

Error in the phone

Sorry, the phone number is missing some digits. Add the rest and press the button again.

The facts are the same in every version. Only the author’s attitude to them changes. No position is better than another: what suits your people and the moment is right.

In the brief the tone is described by one word out of four. The match with the axes is the same as the starting position in the diagram, and you can depart from it:

• formal: formal, serious, respectful, matter-of-fact;
• calm: between formal and casual, serious, respectful, the most matter-of-fact of the four;
• warm: rather casual, serious with a touch of lightness, respectful, noticeably enthusiastic;
• bold: casual, funny, irreverent, enthusiastic.

No position is better than another. A tone is chosen by two things: who is reading and in what state (a person with a land dispute is worried, and a festival-goer has come for joy) and what you really are like. Irreverence doesn’t suit an expert in disputes, and officialese doesn’t suit a festival.

Check yourself: name the four axes of tone.

Formal and casual; serious and funny; respectful and irreverent; matter-of-fact and enthusiastic.

Tone for the situation

One position on the axes is a starting point. Then for each situation on the site you decide how far to depart from it. Here is a map for a reserved project (yours will be different):

• A greeting. A little warmer than usual: the person has come with hope.
• Prices and terms. Neutral and exact. No smiles where the numbers are.
• An error in a form. Serious, no jokes, with a clear step.
• A refusal. Calm and respectful: “Sorry, that’s not something we do. You might want…”
• A success. Warm, but without rapture: “Request received. We’ll call you today before 6 p.m.”
• Legal texts. As clear and restrained as possible (the next lesson is about this).

From all this follows the main defense against falseness. Tone is not a mask put on over the facts. If your project is really serious and a friendly manner isn’t natural to you, don’t imitate it. A reader feels the difference between warmth and a show of it.

A style guide

So that the voice doesn’t change from page to page and from author to author (in six months you too are another author), you write it down in a style guide. A good guide is short: it fits on one page and can be read in five minutes. What goes in it:

1. Three to five principles, each with a “do and don’t” pair, from your own project’s material. A principle without an example doesn’t work: “we write clearly” says nothing, while “do: ‘We’ll come and measure’; don’t: ‘A site visit will be conducted’” explains.
2. Words we use and words we don’t. This is the most practical part: a guide with ten words in each list already saves a text from inconsistency. “Deadline” instead of “implementation timeframe”, “request” instead of “inquiry submission”. And the “don’t use” list takes in the judgments, clichés and everything you cleared out in the lesson on plain style.
3. Rules of writing. How we write prices ($400 or 400 dollars), dates (28 October or October 28), times (6 p.m. or 18:00), phone numbers and addresses. What we call the main action. Whether we use contractions (“we’ll”) or not. In English there is also: “we” or “I” (a one-person practice such as Kate’s can say “I”, a company says “we”, and the choice should be the same on every page), American or British spelling (pick the one your readers use), the serial comma (“prices, dates, and phone numbers” or without) and sentence case or title case in headings. English has no formal “you” to choose; its way of showing respect is in the choice of words, contractions and “please”.
4. Situations and tone. A map like the one above, a few lines.

Models can be borrowed from big teams. The Mailchimp style guide separates “voice” and “tone”, with many examples; under its terms of use we only link to it and take nothing from it. The UK’s GOV.UK keeps an open guide to writing for government: simple, clear, no bureaucratic language. Microsoft’s writing style guide is long but practical. The American newsroom guides (the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style) settle questions of numbers and capitals. The Russian rules of design and spelling are collected best in the “Kovodstvo” of Artemy Lebedev’s studio, and the Russian school of plain style is Ilyakhov’s. Read them as models, but don’t copy: your voice shouldn’t be someone else’s.

Check yourself: what does a short style guide consist of?

Three to five principles with “do and don’t” pairs, lists of words we use and don’t, rules for writing prices, dates and phone numbers, and a map of tone by situation.

Where tone lets you down

• Tone as a costume. Copying a fashionable brand’s “cheeky” voice is easier than finding your own. But if there is no character behind it, the result is false, and sometimes it hurts.
• Jokes. A joke depends on culture, moment and mood. What makes you laugh irritates someone else. Besides, sharp wordplay and idioms are hard for people who don’t speak English as a first language, for machine translation and for software that reads text aloud.
• Tone that wanders. “We” on the home page, “I” in the form, “Hey there!” in the email. It looks as if different people wrote it, and undermines trust.
• Forced friendship. First names and slang to someone older, or who has come about something serious, sounds cocky.
• A guide nobody reads. Forty pages with no examples lie in a folder. One page you come back to is better.

Check yourself: why can’t you “borrow” another company’s tone?

A voice grows out of the author’s character and readers. Someone else’s sounds strained and may not suit your people.

Practice

Write down your project’s voice and test it in action.

1. In the note “How we speak” enter the tone word from the brief and put a number from 1 to 5 on each axis. Explain the position in one phrase: why so, for your people.
2. Come up with three principles. For each, one “do and don’t” pair from your own field.
3. List three words you use and three you don’t.
4. Write the text under the headline in this tone and label the button with the main action from the brief.
5. Write the same text in the opposite tone: turn a formal one friendly, a bold one reserved. Compare which of the two is closer to your people.

The check looks at structure: the tone word from the brief, the numbers, the pairs of examples, the word lists. Whether the tone suits your people is for you to decide: read both versions aloud and picture a real person from “for whom”.