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When seeking the perfect tone of voice for your brand, it's essential to determine the required level of formality.
I hope that this manual will help you with…
• Navigating through levels of formality
• Choosing the right register for your brand
• Fine-tuning your level(s) of formality with Writitude
Navigating Registers in Business Writing
A register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or situation. To sound more academic, we will quote Michael Halliday, the founder of the register theory. According to Halliday, “a register can be defined as the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type. It is the meaning potential that is accessible in a given social context”.
Since corporate communication covers a wide spectre of purposes and situations, the tone of voice can vary greatly.
Conservative institutions like state governments, financial, medical, and academic organizations require impeccable formality — otherwise, they will be considered unprofessional.
Such institutions speak with communities and other institutions, not individuals — to demonstrate this, they place themselves at a certain distance from their audience, using highly impersonal, respectful, and factual language.
Private financial and banking establishments, although traditionally respectable in their communication, work directly with individuals, hence they will choose a slightly more appealing, yet polite tone.
When it comes to businesses, from fintech to food, there are hundreds of factors at play to define a brand’s level of formality. In some countries and cultures, even makeup brands for teenagers will keep an elegant and polite style in their communication.
In other countries, the respectable middle-aged public will drift toward more approachable language when choosing a bank.
Universal Tone Formality Rules
Besides cultural peculiarities, there are three universal factors that each brand should define for itself when choosing the right formality level for your brand’s tone of voice:
a) Your audience and its demographics: who are your customers? How old are they? Are they mostly single or in a relationship? Do they have children? Do they go to work — if yes, what do they do for a living? What do they do in their spare time? What is their lifestyle?
It is also important to think broader — who are your clients’ friends and family?
With whom do your clients work? In other words, what communication will your clients expect from other people and brands? What would they like to hear?
b) Your brand personality. What impression do you want to make on your customers? If you wish to emphasize your high level of professionalism, we advise you to maintain a formal register. If you prefer a more approachable image with more customer feedback, using a friendlier, less formal tone is a must.
c) Regardless of your audience’s demographics and your brand personality, your tone will also change depending on the channel you will be using.
Most probably, your monthly newsletters will sound different from your posts on Instagram. And your brand’s LinkedIn page, aiming to impress new business partners and investors, should sound very different from your TikTok account.
Types of voice for different platforms
Even conservative brands tend to loosen up their communication on social media. Platforms like Instagram or Facebook are spaces where brands speak directly to individual consumers.
In a physical office, your brand representatives are there to greet your clients with smiles, polite and welcoming tones, offers of coffee and tea.
Your virtual office will lack all these non-verbal signals, which are essential for establishing human contact. Therefore, if you don’t want to deter your individual clients, you may want to sound less robotic and more human.
For this, you will need to choose a more approachable tone… and, in many cases, add some emojis to your text.
Several Words on the importance of formality (backed with research)
Maintaining the same register throughout the whole publication (or the whole communication channel) is not only crucial for your brand's image. Consistency in tone will directly affect the ease of the client's perception.
And clients will always be drawn to brands whose messages are easier to perceive. This doesn't mean that you have to always use "simple language" — in fact, when your register of choice is formal, switching to everyday vocabulary can make reading difficult for the reader.
In this 2022 article on the Psychology of Language, the authors describe a study aimed to prove that the "mismatching" the tone of voice — like inserting everyday slang into legal documents — will slow down the subjects' reading speed. And the hypothesis was proven successfully:
"We manipulated congruence of context formality and target sentence register (match vs. mismatch), and tracked eye movements during reading. Analyses performed (...) revealed, as expected, longer total reading times for register mismatches compared to matches".
Coming from an academic background, team Writitude is fully on board with this group of researchers. Consistency is key — and our tone-building algorithm will help you adhere (or stick) to your register of choice.
Getting formality right with Writitude
As you see, choosing your level(s) of formality is a demanding but necessary task. Luckily, once you have decided which direction to take, our tone of voice toolkit can help you set up and fine-tune your tone of voice.
The Writitude tone-of-voice wizard allows you to set a level of formality with one click.
• With Writitude’s tone of voice wizard, you can set a general direction…
• …or go into detail and set up requirements that will fit your brand like a bespoke suit.
How to fine-tune your level of formality?
Read more about our options for fine-tuning your levels of formality:
Forbid slang and profanity
Slang refers to informal language that is often used within a specific group or community. Slang can include words or phrases that are not considered standard or formal language, and may change frequently over time.
Think millennials versus Gen-Z — these two groups aren’t too far apart, but Zoomers won’t remember catchphrases from 1990’s TV commercials.
So, if you want to appeal to a wider audience, it’s probably better to refrain from slang expressions.
Profanity refers to language that is considered vulgar, obscene or offensive. It often includes curse words or other expressions that are considered socially unacceptable in polite conversation.
True, slang (and sometimes even a dash of profanity) can make your brand sound more approachable for a certain narrow audience.
However, if you want to appeal to a wider audience, we recommend that you stay clear of expressions that can sound disrespectful or offensive to the general public.
This way, your brand can demonstrate respect for your audience and show that you highly value professionalism in public communication.
Forbid all words considered informal
Informal (or colloquial) language is the language used in everyday conversation between friends, neighbours or co-workers in a casual setting.
In other words, it is a language that we use in safe environments where we can loosen up a bit.
(Examples:
“Boss” instead of “CEO, head of company” “Guys” instead of “colleagues” “Right to the chase” instead of “without further delay”)
This type of language can include slang, diminutives, contractions (e.g. “didn’t” instead of “did not”) and other colloquial expressions.
When we are among friends, we use informal language to show that we feel at ease around them, and make them feel at ease as well.
However, when writing a business report or an important e-mail, we want to demonstrate exactly the opposite — that we are professional and focused on the task at hand.
In such situations, it is better to refrain from informal vocabulary altogether.
Only forbid words considered as very informal
What about the situations where you don’t want to sound neither too chummy, nor too stiff?
Imagine a beauty brand writing a post on LinkedIn to announce that their company has just opened a new branch. Or a coworking space looking to attract more customers.
In such cases, you would probably want to connect with customers and partners on a personal level while maintaining a professional image.
For such instances, Writitude recommends forbidding words that are considered very informal in a brand's communication, while still allowing some informality for a human touch.
Informal language can include mild slang, contractions, abbreviations and other colloquialisms.
Forbid all contractions
Contractions (like “we’re”, “don’t” etc) are a common feature of informal speech. Avoiding them can help you elevate your level of formality in written or spoken communication.
This can be particularly important in industries and organisations where formality is considered professional decorum — in prominent financial firms, pharmacological corporations etc.
Forbid words considered very formal
Sometimes the situation is just the opposite. In certain industries and businesses, formal discourse can deter customers and even investors. For instance, a cool new startup will probably avoid sounding like a conservative bank.
Avoiding excess formality will help your brand create a more approachable and friendly voice in your communication.
Forbidding the use of very formal words will help those who don’t want to sound pretentious, arrogant or distant.
Best practices of business writing: be flexible
Communication is not a single-purpose tool. It is a sophisticated mechanism that uses different settings in each particular case.
As we already mentioned, a brand will need to switch registers from platform to platform. You will also communicate in different ways with institutions and businesses vs. individual customers. We at Writitude know how it works — that’s why we made it possible for you to set a custom tone of voice for each particular channel.
For example, we generated an invitation for a video call using Writitude out-of-box tones of voice and Chat-GPT.
Using our “Friendly and easy-going” tone of voice, you could invite your customers like this:
“Hey! We're so excited to invite you to a demo video call for our awesome new product. Get ready to be amazed! Join us and experience the magic yourself. Can't wait to see your smiling face!”
While in our “Self-confident and slightly formal” tone of voice the same prompt returns a very different text:
“During the video call, our expert team will guide you through a comprehensive demonstration, showcasing the remarkable features and capabilities of our latest innovation. This will provide you with a firsthand experience of the product's exceptional performance and its potential to enhance your daily life.”
When building a brand’s tone of voice, it is highly important to make your own rules.
However, it’s virtually impossible to follow these rules on a daily basis if they are not automated — and that’s where Writitude has got your back.
Sign up for the Writitude's free test account and try a new way of brand writing — creative, easy and perfectly consistent!
