Five mistakes teams make with tone of voice

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit tone of voice.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Common failure modes

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Write like a knowledgeable person talking, not a brochure
• Consistency builds recognition
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Jargon signals insecurity more often than expertise. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What to do next

The short version

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about tone of voice before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Consistency builds recognition — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.