There are three of us, and for a long time we all wrote like different companies. A short post on Market Muser about tone made me admit the real problem, which was that nobody had written down how we sound.

Building the guide took one afternoon and a lot of arguing about adjectives. We narrowed it to four words we could all live with: plain, warm, direct and a bit dry. The arguing was the useful part. Picking words forced us to say out loud what we wanted to sound like.

Then the examples, which did more than the four words ever could. One page of do, one page of do not, both written in our own words. A friendly email opening we liked, next to one we hated, with a line under each explaining why. That last bit matters. Without the why, the other two just guess.

Now a checklist, five lines, stuck at the top of our shared doc. Does the first sentence do any work? Would I say this out loud to someone standing in front of me? Any word here we would never use in speech? And what is the reader supposed to do next? We skip the last one constantly.

The guide killed a few habits too. We used to open announcements with how delighted we were, because that is what professional sounded like to us. It sits on the do not page now, and nobody misses it.

The writing has not got easier. New people still ask what we mean by dry. But the arguments are shorter, and the three of us now sound like one company instead of three.