Like a lot of things pertaining to content, you only notice voice and tone when it’s done badly. When it’s done well, you don’t notice. What this means, is that you’ll never hear content consumers say, ‘well I wasn’t prepared to buy from this online store before, but now that this brand has consistent voice and tone – take me to the shopping cart!’.
Voice and tone are mostly talked about together, and that’s because they’re very similar, but they’re actually slightly different things.
Voice
Voice is one of the things that lets the reader know who this content represents, without knowing who the author is. The voice of the content should be consistent. In government, for example, the voice that we are aiming for is authoritative but not overly formal.
Tone
The tone can change and will be different depending on the channel.
For example, while we still need to always sound like one author we can be slightly less formal and sometimes use humour in different media channels such as social media posts. That content will have a different tone to, say, the UX writing in the in the purchasing process.
Voice and tone and brand
A lot of articles about voice and tone talk about brand. The theory is that choice of voice and tone contributes to brand consistency.
For example, Virgin’s voice and tone is quite chatty and fun. The idea being that you think of their brand as quite fun, and you’ll choose to fly Virgin over their competitors, because it’ll be more fun.
When I’m writing for government, I’m not selling anything, I’m not looking for our unique selling proposition (USP) to differentiate ourselves from our competition.
Voice and tone at DAWE
So if I’m not looking to establish USP through voice and tone, how and why do we manage voice and tone in government?
One way to look at it, is that what we’re actually managing, is consistency of voice and tone across government. One of the tenants of government content is that users shouldn’t need to understand government to interact with us. Users don’t need to know that they’re interacting with a department specifically – they just need to get their job done. So the voice and tone should be consistent with other government content.
Voice and tone for government regulators
Government’s role as regulator means that the content needs to talk about rules and consequences, but also the content shouldn’t sound bossy. Authors of government content have a role to ensure compliance with laws and Australia’s regulation, policy and legislation, if the content is off-putting, it won’t reach its goal of increasing compliance.
So what actually is ‘tone and voice’ and how do you do it?
The Style manual is a government-wide resource with advice on voice and tone that covers:
- choice of words (should I use contractions, or not?)
- viewpoint (using ‘we’ when referring to the department and the reader as ‘you’)
- grammar (for example, choosing active voice over passive voice)
- level of formality (is the tone formal, standard or informal?).
The Neilson Norman Group divide tone into:
- funny vs serious
- formal vs casual
- respectful vs irreverent
- enthusiastic vs matter of fact
Each of those is a sliding scale – not an either / or. I try and aim government content to sit between each of those extremes, tending to one side.
funny <————————————-government content—> serious
formal <—government content————————————> casual
respectful <government content———————————–> irreverent
enthusiastic <—————————–government content—> matter of fact
Content philosophy 
Leave a comment