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voice and tone

How you talk plays a role in how you are treated.

Adjusting voice and tone is critical when talking to different audiences, channels, and audiences.

This strengthens clarity, credibility, and emotional connection.

And there are two factors in play here:

  • Your VOICE—the brand and language style you use in what you do. How do you come across with the audience?; and
  • The TONE—The emotional inflection you choose in a given moment. (E.g., urgent vs. reassuring; formal vs. casual etc.)

Both of these matter. You want consistency of Voice in the mode you’re operating. But you may wish to switch up the tone.

So, at school, with your friends, how you appear in the world—you need to establish a Core Voice and branding that voice is pretty important if you want to win at things.

Attributes of your voice might include:

  • Things used to describe you:
    • Are you empathetic, authoritative, playful, concise, a minimalist, or a details person?
    • You can't be all of them at once.
  • Then you need to think about the communication styles you use to back up the voice. For example:
    • Vocabulary:
      • Preferred words and phrases you use that are signature to you.
    • The way you communicate generally:
      • Are you long and descriptive or a person of few words? Or are you short and punchy, or slow and considered?
    • The way you structure Grammar and Punctuation:
      • Do you make errors in content or is it all perfect?
      • How chaotic and creative is the material?
      • Where do you use capitalizations, exclamation points, and emojis.

All of the above help you build voice. That’s like your base communications operating system.

The next step is to work out your tone based on context.

Techniques for tone adjustment

Here are some tricks to shift tone in various situations:

  1. Watch the audience in real time:
    • Start walking through some content, and detect the users familiarity (you might just want to flat out ask what their level of experience is on a topic).
    • Once you gauge the skill level, adjust accordingly.
  2. Calibrate to the channel:
    • Email:
      • Conversational but structured.
    • Application UI:
      • Concise and direct with minimal text.
    • Blog / article:
      • Balanced and informative.
    • Social media:
      • Engaging.
      • You want the audience to feel some kind of interest or emotion.
  3. Matching the emotion of a situation:
    • If someone is frustrated, mirror the frustration.
    • If someone is laughing, laugh with them.
    • If there’s a win, take a moment to celebrate and validate success.
    • If someone is sad, act somber to the situation.
  4. Linguistic markers:
    • Formality:
      • Switch pronouns (“you” vs. “one”).
      • Modal verbs (“should” vs. “might want to”).
      • And you can adjust sentence length—to speak to formality.
    • Visual text structures:
      • How you use bold, italics, punctuation, or line breaks is important to tone.
      • You can use them to great effect to highlight tone shifts (e.g., excitement, warnings).

Conclusion

The cool thing about this topic is - now with AI you can take any content and rapidly shift its tone for different audiences.

You don’t even realise it, but the tone and voice you take on is most likely not even yours.

Institutions and cultural norms assign a tone to you.

You parrot it to fit in.

So imagine how powerful it is, to realise you can craft your own tone?

A voice can also help you go stealth as well.

Perhaps you create one voice for the world, and have another for the things you really want to do?