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Voice & Tone Guidelines

As you create text for your web pages, follow our Voice and Tone guidelines so your readers will recognize a familiar voice throughout your pages and have a consistent experience on all our sites.

What is Voice?

Voice uses a recognizable style to speak to your readers in a personal way. It helps them connect with your content and gives them the feeling that they’re listening to someone who understands their needs.

Using a voice that’s unique to Liberty makes us memorable among other university websites. It reflects our identity and represents who we are. Voice gives our content personality and should be consistent across our entire web presence.

What is Tone?

Tone is the mood you communicate through your web content. As your user’s needs change, you’ll adapt your tone of voice to fit the context.

For example, tone will probably change for these different types of text:

  • Marketing material
  • Instructional documents
  • Task-based/Help text
  • News information

Liberty’s Voice Guidelines

Incorporating our voice into all our websites is a work in progress. You can help by following the practices below as you create text for your pages.

The voice on Liberty’s sites should be warm and inviting. Through our words, our target audience feels welcome and, in most cases, is directly addressed in the second-person point of view. We try to stay “you” focused instead of “we” focused on most of our pages, and we avoid using impersonal words like “the student” or “students” to address our audience. Instead, we use plenty of pronouns like you, your and you’re.

We are user-focused, and our style should stay benefit-driven as we write and try to connect with our readers on an emotional level. Our readers should feel that their questions are answered and their needs are met when they visit our pages.

Using our voice guidelines, we effectively communicate all we offer, not leaving anything out. We don’t make things too difficult to find so that our users give up.

As needed, our tone will switch between casual/conversational and authoritative/concise depending on the topic and the needs of the user.

> See web writing tips

See our WordPress 301 video tutorial on Voice & Tone

 

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