Tone of voice

What tone of voice work is

Your voice is constant. It is who the company sounds like, and it should not change between a Tuesday and a Thursday. Tone is the pitch that voice takes in a particular situation. The same business is warmer in a welcome email, firmer in a contract, shorter and calmer in an apology, and none of those is a different company speaking.

This service produces one thing: a small set of named situations, usually five or six, each with the register defined in two or three lines and each shown with a worked before-and-after taken from your own material. That is the whole deliverable. There is no chapter on values and no page about your personality.

It is not brand voice guidelines, which describe the voice itself and carry a short tone table inside them. If you are buying the guidelines, the tone work comes with them and you should not buy it twice. This page is for the business whose voice is already recognisable and whose trouble is entirely situational.

When you need one

You need it when the writing is fine until something goes wrong. The sales pages read well, and then a delivery is late and the email that goes out is either stiff and legalistic or over-familiar, and in both cases it makes the situation worse.

You need it when a price increase, a policy change or a discontinued product is coming, and the letter announcing it will be read by every customer you have. That letter gets written once and judged for a long time.

You need it when several people answer customers and each has invented their own register, so the same complaint gets a chilly reply on Monday and an apologetic one on Thursday depending on who opened it.

You do not need it if the voice itself is unsettled, if pages written by different people do not sound like one company at all. Tone cannot be set on top of a voice that has not been decided. Start with the guidelines, or with the one-page list of words to use and avoid if the budget is small. And if what you actually have is one document in the wrong register, that is a tone adjustment on a single piece, which is far cheaper than this.

What goes in it

The situations are chosen from your own working week, not from a list of generic ones. These five are in almost every set.

• The sales page. Confident without overclaiming. The register most businesses already get closest to, and the one against which the others are calibrated.
• The price increase. Direct, early, unapologetic about the decision and specific about the number and the date. The commonest failure is burying it in gratitude.
• The apology. Short, first-person, no passive voice, no explanation before the admission. What you will do next, and by when.
• The refusal. Turning down a request, a discount, a warranty claim or a piece of work. Warm, final, and without the false hope that produces three more emails.
• The technical support answer. Plain, sequential, and written for someone who is already annoyed. No jokes, and no condescension either.

A sixth is usually added for whatever your business does most: a quote follow-up, a booking reminder, a renewal, a recruitment reply. Each situation gets the register in two or three lines, a list of the moves that belong in it and the moves that do not, and one real piece of yours rewritten beside the original with the changes annotated.

What you get

The tone set. Six pages, one per situation, each with the register, the do-and-do-not list, and the before-and-after side by side. Written to be read one page at a time by someone about to write that exact thing.

The rewrites as usable copy. The "after" versions are finished text, not illustrations. The apology and the refusal in particular usually become templates the day they arrive.

The one-page summary. All six registers in a grid, for pinning up beside the person who answers the email.

A forty-five-minute session. Working through a live piece of writing against the set, with whoever answers customers.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. An independent insurance brokerage in New Brunswick with six staff. The website is calm and plain and customers say they like it. Everything else is written ad hoc by whoever is at the desk. A premium increase notice went out last renewal season opening with two paragraphs of thanks before the number, and the office fielded calls for a week from people who thought it was a marketing email.

The set that gets written has six situations. The premium increase leads with the number, the date and the reason in three sentences, then the options, then the thanks. The declined claim keeps the finality but loses the phrase "we regret to inform", which four staff had been copying from a template nobody could source. The apology drops the explanation to the second paragraph. The renewal reminder gets shorter. The before-and-after for the increase notice is taken from last season's actual letter, and the rewritten version goes out unchanged the following year, which was the point of doing the work in that order.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you write in a normal week, and which of those goes wrong. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed before anything starts, based on the number of situations.
3. Samples. You send two or three real examples of each situation, including the ones you are not proud of. Those are the useful ones.
4. Choosing the situations. A short call to settle which five or six are worth writing, and which are rare enough to skip.
5. Drafting. Five to eight working days. The registers are written first and sent on their own, because arguing about them is quicker before the rewrites exist.
6. Review and the session. One round of revision, then the walkthrough with your people. Two to three weeks from the first call.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, agreed in writing, and not changed without your agreement. The price depends on how many situations you want and how many rewrites each needs. It is a smaller job than full voice guidelines and is often bought instead of them. The pricing page explains how fixed pricing works.

What happens next

The rewrites usually become templates, and the email ones often get built out properly as a written sequence rather than single messages. Businesses that answer complaints in public take the refusal and apology registers into prepared review replies. And where the same register problem shows up in messages to staff rather than customers, announcements people read and believe is the same job pointed inward. This work is complete on its own: six situations, settled, with copy you can send, and nothing further is assumed.