Voice alignment

What voice alignment is

Voice alignment is an edit across a set of existing pages so they sound as though one business wrote them. The subject of each page stays, the structure stays, most of the sentences stay. What is made consistent is the person the pages speak in, the vocabulary used for your own things, the rhythm of the sentences, and the register at the opening and the close.

It is the fix, not the diagnosis. The voice consistency audit finds the problem and lists the evidence: which pages contradict which, and how. This is the pass that goes through and settles it. Buy the audit first if you need to convince somebody, or buy this on its own if the problem is already obvious to everyone who reads the site.

It is also not a set of page rewrites done in bulk. A rewrite decides what a page should say. Alignment accepts what each page says and changes how it says it. That is why it costs a fraction of rewriting the same pages, and why it cannot save a page that is wrong on the substance.

When you need one

You need this when a reader moving through three of your pages can tell that three different people wrote them. Usually that is what happened: the founder wrote the early pages, a marketing hire wrote the middle ones in a different register, and the newest came from whoever had time. The other case is a merge of two sites, where half the pages belong to a business that no longer exists under that name and still speak in its voice.

You do not need this if the inconsistency is only in names, capitals, dates and terminology rather than in voice. That is consistency editing and it is cheaper. Nor do you need it if nobody has ever decided what the voice should be, because alignment has to align to something. In that case the guidelines come first, and this follows.

What gets changed

• The person. Whether the business is “we”, “I”, the firm, or its own name in the third person. Mixed use across a site is the most noticeable failure and the easiest to correct.
• The vocabulary for your own things. One name per service, product, programme and department, applied everywhere, so a reader does not have to work out that three terms describe one offering.
• The sentence rhythm. Pages of relentless long sentences brought closer to the pages that read well, and pages of clipped fragments given enough connective tissue to sound composed rather than curt.
• The register at the edges. Openings and closings vary the most, because they are where writers reach for a flourish. These come into line first, since most readers judge the voice from them.
• The tics. Rhetorical questions stacked at the top of a page, exclamation marks, industry jargon on pages meant for buyers, and superlatives no page can support.

What is not changed is anything factual, any claim, or the argument of a page. If aligning a page would mean rewriting its argument, the page is flagged rather than quietly reworked.

What you get

The aligned pages. Each as an editable document with changes marked against the original, so anyone who wrote one of them can see exactly what was altered and why.

The reference page. One page describing the voice the set has been aligned to, with three or four pairs of before-and-after sentences taken from your own pages rather than invented examples. This is what your next writer is handed.

The exceptions list. Pages that could not be aligned by editing, with a line on each saying why and what it would take instead. Sometimes the list is empty.

A worked example

An illustration. A Saskatoon engineering consultancy has twenty-two pages written over nine years by four engineers and a marketing coordinator who has since left. Eleven pages say “we”. Six say “the firm”. Five use the company's own name in the third person, which reads as though somebody outside the business wrote them. The coordinator's pages open with rhetorical questions in a warm register none of the engineers would use in a meeting. The engineers' pages are accurate, dense, and open with a definition. The same service is called three different things across the set.

The alignment settles on “we”, because that is what the partners say aloud and what the two most-read pages already use. Every third-person mention of the company is converted. The rhetorical openings are replaced with the plain statement that followed them, which in each case was already sitting in the second paragraph. The three names for one service become one, with the other two kept once each as “also called”. The engineers' density is left alone, because it is what clients hire them for; only their opening sentences are loosened. Two pages go on the exceptions list: a joint-venture page describing a partnership that has ended, and a careers page whose voice cannot be settled without deciding who the firm now wants to hire. Twenty pages, about three weeks.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. How many pages, who wrote them, and which two or three already sound the way you want the rest to sound. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Per set of pages, agreed before anything starts, with the page count named in it.
3. The reference. Your existing guidelines if you have them, or the two or three exemplar pages if you do not. The voice is agreed before any editing, in a short note you sign off.
4. The work. Roughly a week per eight to ten pages. The first three take the longest, because that is where the decisions get made.
5. Delivery. The aligned pages, the reference page and the exceptions list, in one batch with one round of changes.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the cost is driven by the number of pages and by how far apart they currently are. A set varying only in person and vocabulary is quick. A set where one author wrote in an entirely different register takes longer, and where more than a third of a set needs that treatment I will say plainly that rewriting is better value than editing. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working, and the number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. Most businesses want the decisions written down so the drift does not start again, which is a short document on how the company sounds, or the cheaper one-page version in a list of words to use and avoid. Where several people keep publishing, a set of house rules and a named reviewer do more than editing after the fact. And the pages on the exceptions list, if there are any, come back as rewrites when you are ready. None of it is assumed. Aligning one set of pages is a complete piece of work, and a site that sounds like one business is the result you paid for.