Tone and Style
Different media demand different styles. The internet generally has a more casual ‘mood’ in its way of communicating than you would expect to find in a traditional brochure. The tone of a company’s annual report will probably be positioned another step toward the more serious. But these distinctions are becoming blurred as the stuffiness of conventional communications — brochures, formal reports and letters — starts to look more and more old-fashioned and simply less common.
Tone
First consider the question: What are you trying to do?
- Inform ?
- Persuade ?
- Challenge ?
- Sell ?
- Amuse ?
- Provoke ?
Now, what tone will achieve your aim?
Be careful here, as the answer to these two questions won’t necessarily be the same. If you seek to sell and your tone is a selling one, you’ll probably just switch off your reader, who may not warm to a style that may be too direct and aggressive.
If you are seeking to persuade or inform, consider the position of your reader and what he seeks, believes or needs.
Style: Orwellian insight
George Orwell — who gave us Animal Farm and 1984 — wrote:
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes will ask himself at least four questions:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
- Could I put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”
Consistency
Probably the greatest style failure in many internet sites is in consistency: several different styles are presented, betraying the fact that many different authors over a long period of time have had a hand in putting together the site’s text.
When you consider consistency, look for it in:
Tone
- Formality and mood
- The use of contractions, like “We’re” for “we are”
- Use of the first or third person: “We make...” or “The company makes...”
Punctuation
- Review our specific recommendations on this subject
- Full stops and the number of spaces that follow them
- Use of brackets and em-dashes (an em-dash is a dash as wide as an ‘m’ and there’s one after the word ‘Orwell’ above)
- Use of single and double quotes
- Handling of Paragraphs: there’s more on this in Presentation