Voice Is Not Tone
The first clarification that saves teams hours of confusion: voice and tone are not the same thing. Voice is the consistent character of your brand — the way it would speak in any situation. It doesn't change. Tone is how that voice modulates for context — more formal in a legal update, more warm in an onboarding email, more direct in a service outage. Voice is who you are; tone is how you show up to the moment.
Brands that confuse these two end up with documentation that says "we are friendly and professional" — which is so generic it provides zero guidance to a writer staring at a blank page. A useful voice definition is specific enough that someone could read your documentation, write a paragraph cold, and have it sound recognizably like you.
Defining Voice as a Set of Dimensions
The most practical voice frameworks treat voice not as adjectives but as a set of sliders. Each dimension is a tension you've consciously chosen a place on. The dimensions we use most often:
- Warm ↔ Professional. Where you sit on the spectrum between relationship-led and credibility-led tone.
- Formal ↔ Casual. Sentence length, contractions, punctuation choices, willingness to use sentence fragments.
- Direct ↔ Generous. How quickly you get to the point, and how much context you offer before you do.
- Earnest ↔ Witty. Whether humour shows up in your default tone or only in specific situations.
- Opinionated ↔ Neutral. Whether your writing takes positions or presents balanced information.
For each dimension, pick a position and write a one-sentence rationale. The brands with the strongest voices tend to take strong positions on three or four dimensions, not soft positions on all of them. "We are extremely warm, extremely direct, and noticeably opinionated" gives a writer much more to work with than "we are friendly and helpful."
Voice Documentation That People Actually Use
A voice document gets used when it's written for the person staring at a blank page, not for the brand consultant who wrote it. The structure we recommend, in order of practical usefulness:
- The voice dimensions. The slider definitions above, with a one-sentence rationale for each.
- Sample copy across formats. A homepage hero, a product description, an onboarding email, a support reply, a social post, an error message. Written in voice. Annotated to show why the choices are what they are.
- Do / don't pairs. Side-by-side examples of in-voice and out-of-voice copy for the same scenario. These do more for new writers than any amount of theory.
