Tone of Voice Strategy in Technical Documentation
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The tone of voice is quite a popular idea, especially for big companies. It provides the means to improve communication and connect with clients on a more personal level. Is there a place for the tone of voice in help authoring? We think there is. It is called technical communication after all.
Let’s try to understand what the tone of voice is and find the best ways to apply it to help writing.
The tone of voice is how you choose to speak to clients through all communication channels. This includes everything starting from the actual voice tones of your phone support, sales reps and ending with images on your website and the lexical units your company chooses in its texts. It’s like your whole company is a human being that has a character which is reflected in everything it does. The tone of voice is how you would like to be seen, or…heard.
Ideally, every person in your company is trying to be nice and helpful to customers, but everyone has a different idea of what this means. When a company has a tone of voice strategy mapped out, all employees understand how exactly they should communicate with clients. This is a conscious choice to move from random acts of niceness to a major goal-driven strategy.
This is when it brings maximum results. If that’s the case for you, the documentation team will be able to use the corporate guidelines and follow them.
Sometimes, the documentation team has to come up with a voice of tone strategy on its own when all that is available to them is a vague idea of what the overall tone of voice for the company is. This is especially true for technical writing agencies – they have to create user manuals for many companies and sometimes the tone of voice is simply not part of the conversation. Often, companies still view technical documentation as something that is not supposed to be influenced by the tone of voice strategy, unlike marketing/customer success. However, we advise that you go through this anyway – it works perfectly as a side question for better understanding how to treat the target audience right.
When you write documentation, every word choice matters. We have some tips for you how to make the right one:
When you generate a tone of voice strategy for the technical docs you are creating, the best place to keep it is the documentation plan. Let your team access and revisit the strategy in a convenient manner. Read more on documentation plans in this article.
No use case is the same, of course. Find your own voice and see whether what you are doing at the moment fully supports it.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices
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