The voice document nobody opens

Open a set of voice guidelines and you’ll usually find three adjectives. Confident, approachable, human. Sometimes a fourth for range. They’re never wrong, exactly. They’re just no help at all when you’re sitting there trying to write a shipping notification.

An adjective describes how the finished thing should feel. It doesn’t tell you what to do while you’re writing it. Two people both aiming at confident will file completely different copy and both defend it, and neither of them has misread the brief.

What goes in ours instead

A list of things the brand doesn’t do. No exclamation marks. Never a number we can’t point at a source for. Don’t explain the joke. Don’t call people users while you’re talking to them.

Duller to read, much easier to use. Anyone can hold one of those against a paragraph and get an answer quickly, without booking a meeting and without the person who wrote the guidelines being in the room. That’s most of the point.

Confident, approachable, human has never once helped anybody write a sentence.

Every rule needs a replacement

Rules like that cost something, which is why they work and also why they’re hard to keep. Giving up exclamation marks means giving up the cheapest way to sound friendly, so you have to go and find another one. Giving up seamless means working out what you meant by it.

So we write them in two columns. The rule on the left, whatever does the job instead on the right. A rule with an empty right-hand column will not survive contact with a deadline. Somebody puts the banned thing back, spelled slightly differently, and honestly they’re right to.

Where to look to see if it worked

Not the homepage. The homepage gets read by everyone before it ships. Look at a password reset, a 404, a rejection note, the label on a disabled button. Whatever survives being written on a Tuesday by somebody who wasn’t at the workshop is the voice you actually have.