A tone of voice people can actually use
Most voice documents are three adjectives and a mood board, which is why most brands sound like each other.
Replace adjectives with rules. "Confident, friendly, human" changes nothing. "We never use exclamation marks", "we say price not investment", and a rewritten before-and-after for each rule will change what people write tomorrow.
The test of a voice guideline is whether a freelancer who has never met you can write a passable paragraph from it. Most fail, because they describe a personality rather than giving instructions.
Adjectives are not rules
Confident, approachable, bold, human. Every brand claims these and none of them tells a writer what to do on a Tuesday. A rule is specific enough to be broken: we do not use exclamation marks, we write "you" not "customers", we never start a sentence with "At Colleviate, we believe".
Show the rewrite
For every rule, a before and after using your own real copy. This is the part people actually read and the part most documents omit. Twenty pairs teaches a voice faster than ten pages of description.
Decide the boring things
Numerals or words. Oxford comma or not. How prices are written. Whether you capitalise product names. Date format. British or American spelling, which in India is worth stating because both arrive daily. These are not style preferences, they are the difference between a site that reads as one organisation and one that reads as eleven freelancers.
Write the "never" list
The words you will not use. Journey, solutions, leverage, unlock, seamless, passionate, ecosystem, game-changing. A short prohibition list does more for a brand's writing than any amount of aspirational description.
Keeping it alive
A voice survives through editing, not documents. Someone has to read what goes out and send things back. Where that person does not exist, the voice reverts to the industry default within about two quarters, regardless of how good the guideline is.
Questions we get asked
What makes a tone of voice guideline usable?
Specific rules with before-and-after rewrites from your own copy, decisions on the mechanical questions, and a list of words you will not use.
Who keeps a brand voice consistent?
An editor. Documents describe a voice; editing maintains one. Without somebody sending work back, a voice drifts to the category default within a couple of quarters.
Start with a Growth Audit
Every Colleviate engagement begins with an outside-in read of your brand and its competitive cluster, before we recommend a single line of spend.
Ask for a scoped auditWhat we do · How we produce it · Who we do it for · Talk to us