The 5 Most Common Mistakes To Avoid When Crafting Your Voice & Tone Guidelines
So you’re a Copywriter or UX Writer and are being asked to create voice and tone guidelines for your brand, and after having flipped through all the step-by-step instructions online, you are now (kind of) ready to go. But wait! Before you embark on your style guide journey, pay some mind to the most common pitfalls that might pop up along the way.
What are voice and tone guidelines?
When you write something, you can write it in a million different ways. (Well, almost, but you get my point). In order to know which words, which syntax, even which punctuation to choose out of all those options, we first need to define what our text should sound like to readers. Should it sound more formal and conservative? Or funny, quirky, and informal? Or caring, empathetic, and sensitive? This is far from being a trivial question: Whether you choose one or the other will have an impact on how your text is perceived by readers. If you work for a certain company or client, you want your text to represent your brand properly. Therefore, writers use so-called voice and tone guidelines, which help them make decisions about how to write their texts. This applies especially to Copywriters and UX Writers, for whom brand voice is especially important.
The most common mistakes when crafting voice and tone guidelines
Creating voice and tone guidelines is always an adventure. This is due to the fact that each brand is highly individual and each company or client has specific needs when it comes to the requirements of a voice and tone style guide. Therefore, even experienced writers may struggle when being asked to create one. To fully take into account the individual requirements of both the company or client and the brand, watch out for the following five most common mistakes made while defining voice and tone guidelines.
1) You don’t differentiate between voice and tone.
Let’s start out really easily. Voice, tone, tonality, style — there are a bunch of different terms out there that can make it hard to accurately discuss and work with voice and tone guidelines. As a consequence, we speak of voice and tone in an inconsistent or incorrect way and cause confusion for everybody working with our guidelines.
To avoid this mistake, you can follow this simple definition: Voice can be described as the overall personality a brand takes on in its copy, the tone is the various shades the voice has in different situations (think of how you would write a headline in a very bold tone, and setting labels in a more subtle tone, while both represent the same voice). The style can be understood as the summary of both — simple as that.
To get everybody on the same page, consider putting these definitions at the very beginning of your style guide’s introduction. From here on out, be very careful and consistent in your use of these terms. Write a more general, but vivid description of your voice and very detailed descriptions of the different tones you want to use, and here, also give information about the situations a specific tone comes into play and also involve tangible practical examples.
2) You don’t conduct desk research before you start.
Quite often, we start the process of crafting our style guide by just putting together the rules, principles, and examples we need in order to define our voice and tone. For this, many writers make the mistake of analyzing nothing but the existing brand principles and, based on these, brainstorming about what they think their voice and tone should sound like.
However, this is a missed chance on many levels: Usually, there is much more valuable information available that is of worth when putting together our voice and tone, and as a consequence of neglecting this information, the contents of our style guide aren’t as rich as they could be and may lack information that might be valuable for the users of our style guide. Or maybe we don’t choose the most appropriate format and layout for our style guide, simply because we don’t know about best practice solutions.
To avoid this, make sure you conduct extensive desk research, before even thinking about hitting the keys of your laptop. Your desk research should not only include going through all the existing brand material of your company or client, it should also include taking a closer look at other companies’ style guides, the media most commonly used in your company (e.g. PDFs, Confluence wiki pages, etc.), and researching best practice solutions for your layout, structure, and layout.
3) You don’t involve your stakeholders early on.
When we create voice and tone guidelines, chances are there are other people on our team or in our company that perform writing tasks — be it because they write for the company’s marketing blog or manage the Social Media accounts.
Given that the most important success factor for voice and tone guidelines is that they are applied to all writing-related touchpoints users have with our brand, we definitely want those other writers to work with your guidelines. However, many authors of voice and tone guidelines simply research the existing brand material, write their guidelines and publish them, without ever having talked to their most relevant stakeholders.
As a consequence, we weaken our chances of a) getting all the information we need about both our brand and its touchpoints, and of b) others working with our guidelines, simply because we didn’t ask our stakeholders about their knowledge, their needs, and their preferences.
To avoid this mistake, map out all your important stakeholders before you start composing your guidelines. Involve them systematically in an early stage by interviewing them for both how they wish to use a style guide and their experience with their trusted touchpoints. Keep them updated about the progress of your voice and tone guidelines and ask them for feedback as soon as you completed your first draft.
4) Your guidelines are way too vague.
Let me be honest here. This is my biiiiiggest pet peeve in voice and tone style guides: those guidelines that blare out truisms and the most general truths about how to decently talk to customers and sell them as clear directives.
Phrases like “We respect our users and meet them on eye-level” do not help writers to choose certain style elements for their copy and avoid others. If we keep the informative value of our guidelines on a level as abstract and vague as this, our style guide won’t be of high value to writers — and it will probably fail in its mission of ensuring a consistent style among brand touchpoints that include copy.
To avoid this mistake, always include two things: 1) real language-based implications (e.g. “Use short sentences”, “Involve metaphors” etc.) and 2) examples of dos and don’ts. That will give writers a clear idea of what you would want the copy to sound like, and thus make your voice and tone guidelines super helpful to any writer.
5) You don’t test your style guide properly.
Your style guide is the home to your voice and tone guidelines, and: it is also a product. And what do we do with products? Right, we test them. Only this time, we don’t test our product with end-users. Instead, we test our style guide — and with it our voice and tone guidelines — with the stakeholders who are supposed to work with our guidelines, or in other words: the users of our style guide.
Sounds about right? Well, many authors of voice and tone guidelines don’t test their style guide, simply because they don’t think of it as a product. As a consequence, we carefully craft voice and tone guidelines that patiently collect dust in our colleagues’ drawers because they don’t meet the needs of our target audience.
To avoid this mistake, test early. Create an MVP (minimum viable product) of your style guide and give it to selected stakeholders, ask for feedback, adjust your style guide — and repeat. For this, you can either use classic user tests (i.e. give your stakeholders a certain task and observe them doing it, while letting them explain their thoughts), or you can use other classic qualitative research methods such as structured journaling (i.e. ask your stakeholders to use your style guide for a certain period of time in their everyday working routine and let them do a written self-interview with the help of pre-scripted questions frequently). This will help you to craft a style guide that serves your target audience.
Conclusion
There may be a lot of potential mistakes that can be made while creating your voice and tone guidelines (unfortunately, far more than have been mentioned in this article). However, the most profound one you can make is probably not creating voice and tone guidelines at all. Or differently put: Every style guide is better than having no style guide at all. The best thing you can do is start out with a very basic version, collect feedback, improve the first draft, and repeat the process. Simply start, don’t put yourself under the pressure of instant perfection, and watch yourself soon helping others to avoid the most common mistakes.
If you want to learn more about how to craft your voice and tone in UX Writing and Copywriting, check out my course about voice and tone on Udemy.
I’m a writer in tech and writing instructor from Munich, Germany. When not writing or educating, I’m out for a long hike or a quick snack. If you want to join me in one of my classes on Technical Writing or UX Writing, check out my courses on Skillshare and Udemy or follow me on Instagram for more tips & tricks about writing in tech.
