There’s only one s in focused. I know this in my bones. The wrongness of the other way is venomous to my ears. But sometimes, I write for clients who insist I spell it wrong. “Focussed”. Yuck.
I know, I know, I’m lucky if this is the biggest moral compromise my job asks of me. But I also know I’m not alone. How many more of you out there are valiantly suffering? Forced to use Oxford commas, variant spellings, colloquialisms and contractions that you feel in your truest heart to be wrong?
It puts you between a rock and a hard place. If you follow the company style, you have to write in a way you feel is bad. That messes with your job satisfaction. But if you go your own way, you’re making the company’s writing style inconsistent.
Does a consistent tone of voice even matter?
Quite a lot actually – if you’re trying to build a brand that sticks.
Inconsistent writing makes customers feel like your company doesn’t know its own mind. If your website, blog, and customer support chat all sound different, your customers will struggle to get what your brand stands for. That makes you seem less trustworthy.
A brand needs to sound the same across all channels. That’s how you build trust and brand loyalty. Without it, you can say goodbye to those return customers you’ve been dreaming of.
How do we navigate the moral maze?
When companies make this case to their people – the case for staying on-brand – they often put it in terms of presenting a united front, or being team players, or acting as one brand.
Which all makes sense – but it doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? No one wants to feel like a drone.
But what if we left the sporting and military metaphors behind and turned to the arts? What if we thought of keeping our writing on-brand as a collective act of playing pretend? What if we thought of writing in the company style as getting into character?
Because let’s face it: whether you object to the company’s specific writing style or not, it is a bit unnatural and artificial for a whole group of people to try to write the same way. You could say it’s a bit … performative. So let’s lean into that. Whatever your attitude going in, this way of thinking makes the important work of keeping your writing on-brand easier and more fun.
Treat brand as a hat you don and doff
So take another look at your company’s writing rules and think about what sort of person would write like that. If you normally wouldn’t, who would? Use your imagination and make them larger than life!
Then, when you’re writing for work, pretend you’re that person. Get into character as the company and play-act their personality and preferences through your writing.
That frees you to write in ways you never would personally, because now you’re in the headspace of playing at being someone else. Instead of battling the English teacher in your head about starting sentences with “But”, you get to have fun asking yourself “What would my on-brand character say here, and how?”
And then after work, you get to shake it off. Take the character off like a costume and go back to being you, who’s free to sign off messages with “xoxo” instead of “Kind regards”.
Take it from me: this is not only freeing and fun, it also puts personal language gripes – like my own aversion to the extra s in “focussed” – into perspective.
A double s here and there never hurt anyone, and for that client’s customers, it keeps up the valuable impression that they’re always dealing with the same character. And I’m no less of an individual for setting my bugbears temporarily aside. Whoever I’m writing for, in whatever style, I’m still me. I just know how to carry off a lot of different hats.
And when the hat hangs too heavy…
If you just can’t get into character comfortably, you can always call in an AI understudy. We write custom prompts that convert any piece of writing into your brand’s tone of voice.
Written by Matt Boothman, Senior Writer at Definition.