Tone and style
I’ve mentioned before that one of my roles at Clearleft is to be a content buddy:
If anyone is writing a talk, or a blog post, or a proposal and they want an extra pair of eyes on it, I’m there to help.
Ideally this happens in real time over video while we both have the same Google doc open:
That way, instead of just getting the suggestions, we can talk through the reasoning behind each one.
I was doing that recently with Rebecca when she was writing an announcement blog post for the Leading Design on-demand platform.
Talking through the structure, I suggested this narrative flow:
- Start by describing the problem from the reader’s perspective—put yourself in their shoes and enumerate their struggles. This is the part of the story where you describe the dragon in all its horrifying detail.
- Now show them the sword, the supernatural aid that you can hand to them. Describe the product in purely subjective terms. No need to use adjectives. Let the scale of the offering speak for itself.
- Then step back into the reader’s shoes and describe what life will be like after they’ve signed up and they’ve slain the dragon.
- Finish with the call to adventure.
I think that blog post turned out well. And we both had good fun wrangling it into shape.
Today I was working on another great blog post, this time by Luke. Alas, the content buddying couldn’t be in real time so I had to make my suggestions asynchronously.
I still like to provide some reasoning for my changes, so I scattered comments throughout. I was also able to refer to something I put together a little while back…
Here’s the Clearleft tone of voice and style guide document.
I tried to keep it as short as possible. There’s always a danger that the style guide section in particular could grow and grow, so I kept to specific things that have come up in actual usage.
I hadn’t looked at it in a while so I was able to see it with somewhat fresh eyes today. Inevitably I spotted some things that could be better. But overall, I think it’s pretty good.
It’s just for internal use at Clearleft, but rather than have it live in a Google Drive or Dropbox folder, I figured it would be easier to refer to it with a URL. And we’ve always liked sharing our processes openly. So even though it’s probably of no interest to anyone outside of Clearleft, here it is: toneofvoice.clearleft.com