Defining tone of voice

Most tone-of-voice documents describe an ideal: authentic, approachable, professional, competent. Every company claims all four, and the writing changes not at all.

Define by contrast

The useful format is a pair, not an adjective. Each pair says what you are and what you are deliberately not.

Three to five pairs are enough. The second column is where the guidance lives, because it draws a line a writer can actually see.

The banned list

The fastest way to change house writing is a list of phrases nobody may use. It is concrete, checkable and immediately effective.

Typical entries: "leading provider", "solutions", "state of the art", "your reliable partner", "we would be delighted to", "in today's world", "innovative". Add whatever your own drafts keep producing.

Add a second list of preferred replacements so the rule is not purely negative.

Ten example sentences

Abstract guidance fails at the moment of writing. Ten before-and-after pairs succeed, because a writer can pattern-match.

• Before: "We would be delighted to advise you on your project." After: "Tell us what you are planning. We will say what it costs."
• Before: "Our innovative solutions optimise your processes." After: "We cut the changeover time from four hours to forty minutes."

Collect ten of these from real material. They become the whole guide.

Decide the person and the address

Two mechanical decisions that must be made once and kept.

1. We or I? A one-person business writing "we" reads as pretence. A firm of thirty writing "I" confuses.
2. Formal or informal address, where the language distinguishes them. Switching between the two within a website is the most common and most visible inconsistency.

Where the tone comes from

Not from a workshop. From reading fifty customer enquiries and noting how they write.

If customers write short, plain sentences with practical questions, a formal corporate register creates distance. If they write carefully and formally, breezy informality reads as unserious.

Making it stick

A tone guide is used if it is one page and lives where writing happens. Two pages of pairs, banned phrases and examples, pinned above the desk or in the template.

Review it once a year by reading what was actually published. The gap between the guide and the output is the guide's real accuracy.