The Voice Test

Four questions to ask of anything you publish. If it fails, it was not yours.

You have spent three weeks learning what your voice is not. Not corporate. Not translated. Not cold. This week is about knowing, quickly and reliably, whether the thing you are about to publish actually sounds like you — because the moment of publishing is when the old habits reassert themselves, and they do it quietly.

So here is the test. It takes about two minutes and I run it on everything.

One: could anyone else have written this?

Cover your logo. Cover your name. Hand the words to someone who knows your industry and ask whether they can tell who wrote them.

If it could have come from any of the fifty other businesses doing what you do, it is not a voice. It is a register — the industry’s register, which you have learned very well and which is doing you no good whatsoever.

Two: would I say this out loud?

Read it aloud, properly, to the empty room. You will feel the exact moment it stops sounding like a person. There is always a moment. It is usually a sentence beginning with the word we, containing no verb that anybody actually does.

Anything you would be embarrassed to say to a friend should not be published under your name. Embarrassment, in this context, is a very reliable instrument.

Three: is there an opinion in here?

This is the one people fail most often. It is possible to write four hundred entirely competent words that assert nothing, offend nobody and commit to no position at all. It is also pointless.

You do not have to be combative. You do have to think something. If a reader finishes and cannot say what you believe, they have learned nothing about you and there is no reason for them to come back.

Four: have I said the true thing, or the safe one?

Almost every piece of business writing has a sentence in it that the writer knew, while typing it, was not quite honest. Not a lie. Just the smoother version. The one that avoids the awkward admission, the caveat, the fact that this does not work for everyone.

Find that sentence and replace it with the true one. It will be the best sentence in the piece, and it will be the one people quote back to you.

And then stop

Voice is not a document. It is not a tone-of-voice guideline with three adjectives and a table of do-nots, however much people would like to sell you one.

It is simply the accumulated result of choosing, every single time, to sound like yourself rather than like a business. Do that consistently for a year and you will have a voice so distinctive that people will recognise your writing before they see your name.

There is no other method. There is only the repeated, slightly uncomfortable decision to be a person in public.

This is part of our Reclaim Your Wild series. Come back each week for a new article or sign up and get a monthly round up.