The real cost of ignoring tone of voice

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Nobody bills you for neglecting tone of voice. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Write like a knowledgeable person talking, not a brochure
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Consistency builds recognition. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Turning this into a decision

Jargon signals insecurity more often than expertise. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

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
• Jargon signals insecurity more often than expertise — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.