What to ask your agency about tone of voice

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on tone of voice, these questions are worth asking early.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Write like a knowledgeable person talking, not a brochure. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Jargon signals insecurity more often than expertise. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Three things worth confirming about tone of voice before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Write like a knowledgeable person talking, not a brochure — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.