In a small company, emails, web pages and proposals are written by whoever has time. The owner is formal, the sales colleague is chatty, and the website still carries the voice of the agency that built it. Each text is fine on its own. Together they make the company sound like several different businesses.
A voice guide fixes this without a brand project. It is one page that tells anyone, including a new colleague or an AI writing tool, how your company sounds. This article is for an owner or manager who wants that page in an afternoon.
Start with who you write for
Open the guide with one or two sentences about your reader. For example: "We write for office managers and owners of small companies. They are busy, they are not technical and they want to know what to do next."
This sentence decides most of the later choices: how long the sentences are, whether you explain a term or use it, how much you promise. If you serve two very different readers, such as customers and suppliers, write one sentence for each.
Write five rules
Five is enough to remember and few enough that people follow them. Choose rules that describe your habits, not general virtues. Here is a set to adapt:
- Lead with the point. The first sentence says what the text is about or what you need.
- Use plain words. Say "use" instead of "utilise" and "start" instead of "commence".
- One text, one action. End with a single thing the reader should do and by when.
- Name things the way customers do. Use the term on your invoice and your menu, not the internal one.
- Promise only what you control. Give a date you can keep, not the earliest date you can imagine.
Your own rules may differ. A company that sells to engineers may add "give the number and the unit". A company with a warm, personal style may add "write as you would speak to a regular customer".
Show three examples
A rule alone is easy to nod at and ignore. A before and after pair makes it concrete. Take three real sentences from your own emails or web pages and rewrite them.
Lead with the point
- Before: "Following our conversation last week and after reviewing the various options, we wanted to get back to you regarding the matter of your delivery."
- After: "Your order will arrive on Thursday. Here is what changed since we spoke."
Plain words, one action
- Before: "Please be advised that it is necessary to utilise the attached form in order to commence the process."
- After: "Please fill in the attached form by Friday so we can start."
Promise only what you control
- Before: "We will fix this as soon as possible and get back to you shortly."
- After: "We will check the fault tomorrow morning and write to you by 12:00 with what we found."
Use examples from your own files if you can. They are more convincing for colleagues than invented ones, and they show where your real habits are.
List words to avoid
Add a short list, ten to fifteen items, of words and phrases your readers will skim over or distrust. Typical candidates:
- empty intensifiers: "world-class", "cutting-edge", "best-in-class"
- filler openings: "I hope this email finds you well", "Please be advised"
- vague time: "soon", "shortly", "ASAP"
- internal shorthand: project codes, team nicknames, abbreviations the customer never uses
- pressure words that you do not mean: "urgent", "final reminder"
Next to each, write what to say instead. A list of bans without replacements only makes people stuck.
Decide who keeps it alive
A guide without an owner is out of date in a year. Name one person, not a committee, who answers questions about it, adds a new example when a good text appears and removes a rule nobody uses. Put a review date in the footer, for example every six months.
Make the guide easy to find. Put it where templates and signatures already live, and mention it in the first-week checklist for new colleagues. If you use AI tools for drafts, paste the page into the instructions so that the first draft already follows it. The tool will not know your voice unless you describe it, and the draft still needs a human read. For a regular channel where the voice shows, see A short customer newsletter for a small company.
Check it on one real text
Before you share the guide, test it. Take the last email that went to a customer and the main page of your website. Read each against the five rules and mark where it breaks them. If you find several breaks in both, the guide is addressing a real problem. If you find none, your rules are probably too general. For the AI side of the same question, see Teach AI your brand style.
A one-page outline
Your finished guide fits on one page if it contains:
- one or two sentences about the reader
- five rules, each in one line
- three before and after examples
- ten to fifteen words to avoid, with replacements
- the name of the owner and the review date
If it grows beyond a page, people will stop reading it. Cut examples before you cut rules.
Sources
- Practical guidance based on common business writing practice, offered as a planning aid. The rules, examples and word lists are starting points to adapt to your own company and readers. No client results or product performance figures are claimed in this article.
