Every website I read now sounds the same

I read a lot of company websites. It is the homework before a diagnostic: the client's own site, then eight or ten of the people they lose work to. I have done it for years and it used to be one of the more useful hours of the week.

Lately it has stopped working, because somewhere around the fortieth site I could no longer tell them apart.

Not the businesses. The businesses are plainly different. One of them makes things in a shed in Lincolnshire and one of them runs other people's networks, and they have nothing in common but a turnover band. The writing is the same. Same cadence, same reassurance in the third paragraph, same three-word promise near the top. Cover the logos and I could not reliably match a page to a company, and I do this for a living.

The average is not a fault. It is the mechanism.

It is not hard to work out what happened. Most of that copy was drafted with help, and the help is very good at exactly one thing: producing the most likely next sentence. That is not a criticism, it is a description of how the machine works. Ask for something in a friendly, professional tone and you will get the centre of everything ever written in a friendly professional tone. Competent, quick, and the arithmetic mean of your entire sector.

Nobody chose that. There was no meeting at which a founder said they would like to sound like the average of their four closest competitors. It arrived by default, one reasonable draft at a time, and it arrives faster now, because five people can draft in the time one used to.

Which is roughly the moment somebody suggests a brand voice guide.

An adjective is not an instruction

Open almost any of them and you will find the same three words: authoritative but warm. Sometimes it is confident yet approachable, or expert but human. The pairing changes from firm to firm. The job it fails to do does not.

The description is usually accurate, which is why nobody argues with it. The trouble is that it describes, and the people who need it are not trying to describe your business. They are trying to write as it.

Give "authoritative but warm" to a new marketing hire on their first Monday and watch what happens. They will nod, go away, and produce something that sounds like a careful person being careful. Give it to an agency and you get their house style with your logo on the front. Give it to whatever assistant has appeared inside software you already pay for and you get the average again, delivered with enormous confidence.

None of the three is being lazy. You handed them an adjective, and there is no way to check a draft against an adjective. Was that paragraph authoritative enough? Warm enough? Nobody can settle that, including you, which is why every draft comes back to your desk and waits there until you have read it.

So here is the only test a voice document has to pass. Could somebody who has never met you use it to end an argument about a sentence? When two people disagree about whether a paragraph is right, does the document decide? Almost none of them do. They hand both sides something to quote.

You are the style guide

Two years ago a vague document cost you some inconsistency and an evening of rewriting a month. Annoying, and survivable. It is not survivable at a hundred drafts a month, when the only quality control left in the business is you, reading all of it before it goes out.

I have written before about the context gap: ask one of these tools a generic question and it hands back a plausible stranger's answer, because it knows nothing about your margins, your customers or your constraints. Voice is one line in that same context, and it is the line almost nobody bothers to write down, because it feels like taste rather than fact. It is not. It is simply uncounted.

Which makes this the same problem I write about constantly in a different costume. The knowledge is real, it works, and it exists in exactly one head. Everything queues behind that head. I have listed the five usual signs of it elsewhere; this is the sixth, and the one nobody counts, because rewriting a colleague's draft feels like doing your job rather than being the obstacle.

What a rule looks like

The same job, written so it can actually be followed:

• Your median sentence runs to eleven words. Anything averaging over eighteen is somebody else.
• Roughly one sentence in six is under five words, and it lands after a long build-up. That rhythm is doing more work than any of your adjectives.
• There are nine phrases you reach for that every competitor also reaches for. Here they are. Stop.
• You write "I" when the opinion is yours, and it is nearly always yours. The corporate "we" belongs to a business with more than one person in it.

A new hire can be held to that. So can a model, because you can paste it in and check whether it complied. Nobody in the history of business has ever been held to authoritative but warm.

The difference is not effort. The people writing voice guides are working hard at it. The difference is where the thing came from. One list is somebody's impression of a business, gathered in a workshop, and it will change depending on who was in the room and what sort of week they were having. The other is a count of what the business actually published. A count cannot flatter you and it does not move when you ask it twice.

The uncomfortable check

Take the last three things you published. Strip the logo, the company name, and anything else that gives you away. Hand them to somebody who knows your market well and ask which firm wrote them.

If they cannot tell, you do not have a writing problem and you will not fix it by writing better. You have a specification problem. It will sit exactly where it is until the rules live somewhere other than in your head, which is also the only version of this that survives you being on holiday.

I am not much worried about the machines. What I notice, forty websites into an afternoon, is how many businesses have quietly agreed to sound like one another, and how few of them have any idea it has happened.

Ian Sharpe

Fractional executive and portfolio consultant. The person you meet is the person who does the work. Who am I? →