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Style, tone and voice: The whys, wheres and hows

Style, tone and voice: The whys, wheres and hows

6 minute read

Style, tone and voice: The whys, wheres and hows

6 minute read

Style, tone and voice: The whys, wheres and hows

Lauren Pope

Content Strategy and Digital Transformation Consultant

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I love voice, tone and style guides. It started on my first day working in content. The style guide I was given was like a printed A4 comfort blanket, giving me reassurance and confidence. My love hasn’t diminished over the years. I still find them invaluable for writing and editing and see them as part of the foundation for a solid content programme.

Despite this, they’re not a part of the content ecosystem that we talk about a lot. There’s also a surprising amount of complacency about voice, tone, and style. I regularly come across brands that:

  • Don’t have a set of guidelines at all
  • Have guidelines that aren’t fit for purpose
  • Have guidelines that sit ignored on a shared drive

If you fit into any of these categories, I’d like to try and win you over to my way of thinking. In this post, I’ll look at the value of voice, tone, and style guides. I'll also take you through a couple of different processes for creating one.

Why you need a style, tone and voice guide

It’s easy to assume that brand voice just comes naturally. It may well do if you have a small central team creating content. They may all have intimate experience of the brand, think identically and will never leave the business.If this isn’t your situation, you need a voice, tone and style guide.

Five benefits to having a style, tone and voice guide

Putting one in place will:

  1. Strengthen and differentiate your brand through consistent use of a well-thought-through voice
  2. Promote uniformity in content across different teams, channels, and formats
  3. Make working with agencies and freelancers easier by giving them guidelines to create on-brand content
  4. Ensure you create content that is sensitive to and resonates with your audience
  5. Give you a benchmark to judge content against, or refer to an argument over whether title case is right or wrong

The benefits aren’t just in the quality of your content either; they can be financial too. Having a guide makes it more likely that you’ll get content right with fewer drafts, which has an obvious cost benefit.

The difference between style, tone, and voice

Referring to a ‘voice, tone, and style guide’ might seem a bit awkward, compared to the more common ‘style guide’ or ‘tone of voice guide’. It’s a conscious decision though because I think those terms don’t make all the elements you need for a successful guide totally clear. I see tone, voice, and style as three separate elements, which work together in harmony:

Style

Style is a house ‘style’ for what your writing looks like. For example, where to use capitals, how to spell certain words, reminders on grammar, vocabulary. This might also include design elements like how to use, logo, fonts, and images.

Tone

Tone is how to use your voice in different situations. In life, we adjust our tone according to who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about, but our voice remains the same. Your brand voice is singular, but you can use it with many different tones. Separating voice and tone means you can be empathetic to your users. I think empathy is what makes the difference between just meeting user needs and really engaging them. Here's a simple tool to help guide your tone of voice.

Voice

Voice is a description of the unique, distinctive voice of your brand. This should cover:

  • Personality: is it playful, cheeky and fun like Innocent, or personal, inspiring, straightforward and active like Macmillan?
  • Rhythm and pace: are you short and sharp like Oxfam, or musical like Penhaligons?
  • Vocabulary: plain and simple like Ovo, or rich and poetic like Dom Perignon?

Structuring your voice, tone and style guide

There are lots of different ways to approach the structure of your voice, tone and style guide. This is the structure of a recent guide I created for a client, that might be a simple starting point to work from:

An introduction

Start by telling people what the guide is for, how it will make their job easier, and how to use it.

Voice

Give a set of simple, memorable statements that encompass your brand voice. These statements should cover the qualities of your voice, the adjectives you’d use to describe it, its rhythm, and a list of things that it isn’t. I always accompany each statement with a paragraph explaining it in more detail and showing how to put it into practice.

Tone

Show people how to use that voice with different tones. Explain the kind of tones that people should use in different scenarios and provide examples. It’s good to talk about user empathy at this point too, and reference any personas you have.

Style

An A-Z guide including but not limited to: abbreviations and acronyms, apostrophes, bold, brackets, bullet point, capitalisation, colons, commas, contractions, dates, full stops, headings, hyphenation, linking, numbers and figures, quotations, spelling, titles.

Specialist language

Include sections on any specialist language your brand or organisation has to use. This project was for a children’s charity, so I included sections on the language to use when discussing disability, fostering, and adoption.For every single rule or statement, you make in your guide, provide an example. Always make your examples specific to the organisation, rather than generic. If you want to explain why using the passive voice is a bad thing, it’s much more likely to stick if you use it on an example taken from the kind of copy that people will be dealing with in real life.

How to create your voice, tone and style guide

There are lots of different methods for creating your guide, ranging from quick and low-effort, to more time-consuming and complex. Here I’ve listed two potential methods - one light-touch, one in-depth.

Light-touch

(3-4 days work for one person, plus half a day feedback and review from a colleague)

This is an approach that I took recently for a time-poor client. It meant they got a good style guide in place in under a week.I started with their existing brand guidelines and values and spent some time unpacking them and thinking about how they translated into a voice. Then I wrote up my conclusions as a set of short, definitive statements (e.g. ‘We show, we don’t tell’ and ‘We weigh every word’), with longer explanations and examples.Next, I worked on tone. I used their personas and top user journeys as the basis for a set of scenarios where the brand needed to use a different tone to connect with its audience. After this, I wrote guidelines and examples of how to shift tone in different scenarios and for different users.

The online University of Oxford style guide. This image shows some of the rules around capitalisation, abbreviations and formatting dates.

Finally, I picked a couple of authoritative style guides (Like this one from Oxford University) and plundered them for the style elements, rewriting them in the brand voice and adding specific examples.

In-depth

(2-4 days preparing for and running a workshop for key stakeholders, 2-3 days writing up, 2-4 days preparing for and running a user testing session, 2-4 days editing and finalising)

If you’re taking a more in-depth approach, running a workshop with key stakeholders to establish the key elements of your voice is a great way to start. There are a number of ways you can do this: my suggestion would be to incorporate a card sorting exercise.

You might be familiar with card sorting as a tool in UX for organising information, but it can also be used for branding exercises. In this instance, you would take a large set of qualities your voice could have and adjectives you could use to describe it (trustworthy, fun, traditional, cool, measured, poetic, etc) and write them on individual cards.Have your team sort through the cards, deciding what your brand voice is, what you want it to be, and what it isn’t. Next, prioritise the ‘what you are’ and ‘what you want to be’ cards, and check for conflicting ideas (can you be cool and traditional at the same time?). It will give you the basis for your voice statements, it also gives great fuel for discussion that will help flesh them out and make them feel more real to everyone in the room.

From this point, you can write up an initial voice, tone and style guide, as per the steps listed in the light-touch process above.

User-testing your voice, tone and style guide

The next step is user-testing. You’ll need to mock up some pages or key user journeys according to the new voice, tone, and style guide, and recruit some users to give their feedback. Be careful to approach your users and ask questions that allow you to isolate feedback on your voice and tone rather than on design or usability. Focus on whether your users find your tone easy to understand, and also on how it affects their perception of your brand. Based on their feedback you’ll be able to make necessary adjustments to your guide.

Getting your guide into use

Finishing the writing of your guide isn’t the final step; in one way it’s really just the beginning. You need to get it into circulation and make sure people use it. Sending an email with a link to a Google Doc or an attachment probably won’t get the job done.Think about what works for your organisation in terms of getting people’s attention and what resources and assets they use most. Some ideas to consider might be:

  • Beautifully printed and bound copies planted around the office (I find that giving people assets they can hold in their hands is really effective).
  • A session to present the guide to everyone.
  • A well-designed, easy to search online version (this can be public-facing if you like).
  • Incorporate elements into your templates as a pre-sign off checklist.
  • Looking into what support your CMS has for style guides.

It needs to be a real, tangible presence in your content creation process that everyone involved buys into. Part of that is helping people understand that it’s about more than just where to use (or not use capital letters). It’s about creating a single voice for the brand, and an agreement about the right way to communicate with users.

Need more?

If you’re looking for more inspiration, here are some great places to start:

I love voice, tone and style guides. It started on my first day working in content. The style guide I was given was like a printed A4 comfort blanket, giving me reassurance and confidence. My love hasn’t diminished over the years. I still find them invaluable for writing and editing and see them as part of the foundation for a solid content programme.

Despite this, they’re not a part of the content ecosystem that we talk about a lot. There’s also a surprising amount of complacency about voice, tone, and style. I regularly come across brands that:

  • Don’t have a set of guidelines at all
  • Have guidelines that aren’t fit for purpose
  • Have guidelines that sit ignored on a shared drive

If you fit into any of these categories, I’d like to try and win you over to my way of thinking. In this post, I’ll look at the value of voice, tone, and style guides. I'll also take you through a couple of different processes for creating one.

Why you need a style, tone and voice guide

It’s easy to assume that brand voice just comes naturally. It may well do if you have a small central team creating content. They may all have intimate experience of the brand, think identically and will never leave the business.If this isn’t your situation, you need a voice, tone and style guide.

Five benefits to having a style, tone and voice guide

Putting one in place will:

  1. Strengthen and differentiate your brand through consistent use of a well-thought-through voice
  2. Promote uniformity in content across different teams, channels, and formats
  3. Make working with agencies and freelancers easier by giving them guidelines to create on-brand content
  4. Ensure you create content that is sensitive to and resonates with your audience
  5. Give you a benchmark to judge content against, or refer to an argument over whether title case is right or wrong

The benefits aren’t just in the quality of your content either; they can be financial too. Having a guide makes it more likely that you’ll get content right with fewer drafts, which has an obvious cost benefit.

The difference between style, tone, and voice

Referring to a ‘voice, tone, and style guide’ might seem a bit awkward, compared to the more common ‘style guide’ or ‘tone of voice guide’. It’s a conscious decision though because I think those terms don’t make all the elements you need for a successful guide totally clear. I see tone, voice, and style as three separate elements, which work together in harmony:

Style

Style is a house ‘style’ for what your writing looks like. For example, where to use capitals, how to spell certain words, reminders on grammar, vocabulary. This might also include design elements like how to use, logo, fonts, and images.

Tone

Tone is how to use your voice in different situations. In life, we adjust our tone according to who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about, but our voice remains the same. Your brand voice is singular, but you can use it with many different tones. Separating voice and tone means you can be empathetic to your users. I think empathy is what makes the difference between just meeting user needs and really engaging them. Here's a simple tool to help guide your tone of voice.

Voice

Voice is a description of the unique, distinctive voice of your brand. This should cover:

  • Personality: is it playful, cheeky and fun like Innocent, or personal, inspiring, straightforward and active like Macmillan?
  • Rhythm and pace: are you short and sharp like Oxfam, or musical like Penhaligons?
  • Vocabulary: plain and simple like Ovo, or rich and poetic like Dom Perignon?

Structuring your voice, tone and style guide

There are lots of different ways to approach the structure of your voice, tone and style guide. This is the structure of a recent guide I created for a client, that might be a simple starting point to work from:

An introduction

Start by telling people what the guide is for, how it will make their job easier, and how to use it.

Voice

Give a set of simple, memorable statements that encompass your brand voice. These statements should cover the qualities of your voice, the adjectives you’d use to describe it, its rhythm, and a list of things that it isn’t. I always accompany each statement with a paragraph explaining it in more detail and showing how to put it into practice.

Tone

Show people how to use that voice with different tones. Explain the kind of tones that people should use in different scenarios and provide examples. It’s good to talk about user empathy at this point too, and reference any personas you have.

Style

An A-Z guide including but not limited to: abbreviations and acronyms, apostrophes, bold, brackets, bullet point, capitalisation, colons, commas, contractions, dates, full stops, headings, hyphenation, linking, numbers and figures, quotations, spelling, titles.

Specialist language

Include sections on any specialist language your brand or organisation has to use. This project was for a children’s charity, so I included sections on the language to use when discussing disability, fostering, and adoption.For every single rule or statement, you make in your guide, provide an example. Always make your examples specific to the organisation, rather than generic. If you want to explain why using the passive voice is a bad thing, it’s much more likely to stick if you use it on an example taken from the kind of copy that people will be dealing with in real life.

How to create your voice, tone and style guide

There are lots of different methods for creating your guide, ranging from quick and low-effort, to more time-consuming and complex. Here I’ve listed two potential methods - one light-touch, one in-depth.

Light-touch

(3-4 days work for one person, plus half a day feedback and review from a colleague)

This is an approach that I took recently for a time-poor client. It meant they got a good style guide in place in under a week.I started with their existing brand guidelines and values and spent some time unpacking them and thinking about how they translated into a voice. Then I wrote up my conclusions as a set of short, definitive statements (e.g. ‘We show, we don’t tell’ and ‘We weigh every word’), with longer explanations and examples.Next, I worked on tone. I used their personas and top user journeys as the basis for a set of scenarios where the brand needed to use a different tone to connect with its audience. After this, I wrote guidelines and examples of how to shift tone in different scenarios and for different users.

The online University of Oxford style guide. This image shows some of the rules around capitalisation, abbreviations and formatting dates.

Finally, I picked a couple of authoritative style guides (Like this one from Oxford University) and plundered them for the style elements, rewriting them in the brand voice and adding specific examples.

In-depth

(2-4 days preparing for and running a workshop for key stakeholders, 2-3 days writing up, 2-4 days preparing for and running a user testing session, 2-4 days editing and finalising)

If you’re taking a more in-depth approach, running a workshop with key stakeholders to establish the key elements of your voice is a great way to start. There are a number of ways you can do this: my suggestion would be to incorporate a card sorting exercise.

You might be familiar with card sorting as a tool in UX for organising information, but it can also be used for branding exercises. In this instance, you would take a large set of qualities your voice could have and adjectives you could use to describe it (trustworthy, fun, traditional, cool, measured, poetic, etc) and write them on individual cards.Have your team sort through the cards, deciding what your brand voice is, what you want it to be, and what it isn’t. Next, prioritise the ‘what you are’ and ‘what you want to be’ cards, and check for conflicting ideas (can you be cool and traditional at the same time?). It will give you the basis for your voice statements, it also gives great fuel for discussion that will help flesh them out and make them feel more real to everyone in the room.

From this point, you can write up an initial voice, tone and style guide, as per the steps listed in the light-touch process above.

User-testing your voice, tone and style guide

The next step is user-testing. You’ll need to mock up some pages or key user journeys according to the new voice, tone, and style guide, and recruit some users to give their feedback. Be careful to approach your users and ask questions that allow you to isolate feedback on your voice and tone rather than on design or usability. Focus on whether your users find your tone easy to understand, and also on how it affects their perception of your brand. Based on their feedback you’ll be able to make necessary adjustments to your guide.

Getting your guide into use

Finishing the writing of your guide isn’t the final step; in one way it’s really just the beginning. You need to get it into circulation and make sure people use it. Sending an email with a link to a Google Doc or an attachment probably won’t get the job done.Think about what works for your organisation in terms of getting people’s attention and what resources and assets they use most. Some ideas to consider might be:

  • Beautifully printed and bound copies planted around the office (I find that giving people assets they can hold in their hands is really effective).
  • A session to present the guide to everyone.
  • A well-designed, easy to search online version (this can be public-facing if you like).
  • Incorporate elements into your templates as a pre-sign off checklist.
  • Looking into what support your CMS has for style guides.

It needs to be a real, tangible presence in your content creation process that everyone involved buys into. Part of that is helping people understand that it’s about more than just where to use (or not use capital letters). It’s about creating a single voice for the brand, and an agreement about the right way to communicate with users.

Need more?

If you’re looking for more inspiration, here are some great places to start:


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lauren pope

About the author

Lauren Pope

Lauren is a freelance content strategy and digital transformation consultant, working with organisations that make the world a better, fairer, more beautiful place.

Lauren has been working in content and digital since way back in 2007 and since then has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands, including adidas, American Express, Microsoft and Tetra Pak.  

She lives in Brighton, and loves the Downs, the sea, dystopian fiction and bold lipstick.


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