There’s something in your workplace that slows your decisions, wastes your time, makes your work less effective – and adds to your Sunday evening jitters.
Oh, and it costs US businesses $75 million for every $1 billion they spend, plus about $5,246 a year per employee.
That something is bad writing.
Here in the Definition language team, we spend our days helping companies figure out how they want to sound (their tone of voice), and then furiously rewriting stuff in that style – and training their teams to do the same – until the results start to show.
And the results are undeniable
We’ve seen companies save millions, boost NPS, improve customer perceptions and more – all by sorting out their writing. It’s hugely gratifying – and proof that what we writers do is meaningful rather than just fluff.
But it’s not the reason I get out of bed in the morning.
I’m here for something completely intangible: the moment when an organisation finally clicks with its tone of voice.
How you know it’s really worked
It’s much harder to measure than sales figures and open rates. Sometimes you hear the click when someone you’ve trained rewrites some dusty old policy that’s been left untouched for decades. Or when you notice someone outside brand and marketing critiquing a colleague’s writing against the tone. Or when the tone of voice becomes so fundamental to a brand that it’s used to judge things like images, ads or even employees’ performance.
That moment is real, unforgettable impact – and it always means the more tangible figures will start to flow before long.
I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve heard that click a handful of times – because up to now, only a very few organisations have had the ambition and guts to really go for it – to think of their tone not as a set of guidelines, but as a company-wide behaviour change programme.
But in the last few years I’ve noticed more and more of our clients taking tone of voice really, really seriously. There are three reasons for that – and they also just might be part of the reason why your tone-of-voice-free organisation is falling behind.
1. Top-down is so over
Over the last 30 years or so, the way organisations communicate has shifted.
Tech is partly responsible: social media and instant messaging forced two-way exchanges, moving us away from the top-down broadcasts of yore.
Twitter/X then shortened our word counts, and TikTok carried the torch.
This movement from long-form to short-form has brought an infinite doomscroll’s worth of baggage, but one of its better legacies is that if you want your message to cut through, it had better be clear, fast and easy to read.
2. Humanity breeds trust
Edelman’s Trust Barometer reminds us, year after year that people trust people far more than institutions.
In 1958, 73% of Americans believed their government would ‘do what is right’ most of the time. Since 2007 it’s been under 30%. (Full report at Pew Research Center.)
Just look at that line below – scary stuff, especially if your surname is Bush.
So how do you win trust in 2025? Be authentic, honest, fallible. In other words: less business, more human.
3. AI has made it easier, and cheaper, to change
To make a tangible difference to a big organisation, you need to train enough people, and rewrite enough comms, that the new tone becomes more pervasive than the old one.
For an organisation of thousands, that’s historically been a big undertaking.
AI makes it infinitely more achievable. It can rewrite hundreds of thousands of words in a matter of days, and with an expert writer or two prompting it and checking the outputs, you can go from stuffy to slick pretty much overnight.
So what to do?
Your friendly neighbourhood brand language specialist doesn’t have the regulatory power of government or the tidal force of cultural shifts on their side. But they know exactly how to help you find a tone of voice that suits, turn it into a habit for your people, and make sure it reaches every page, policy and process.
For us, the job isn’t creating some guidelines or revamping your ‘about us’ page. The job is creating a cultural click for your organisation, so that every single person values writing as a tool to make something good happen.
The job, in other words, is impact. The kind that’s measurable. But more importantly, the kind that’s unforgettable.
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Written by Nick Padmore, Head of Language at Definition.
