Business Communication Today: An Analysis (part10)

Controlling Your Style and Tone

Style is the way you use words to achieve a certain tone or overall impression. You can vary your style (your sentence structure and vocabulary) to sound forceful or objective, personal or formal, colorful or dry. The right choice depends on the nature of your message and your relationship with the reader. Although style can be refined using the revision phase, you will save time and a lot of rewriting if you use a style that allows you to achieve the desired tone from the start.

Using a Conversational Tone

The tone of your business messages can range from informal to conversational to formal. If you are in a large organization and you are communicating with your superiors or the customers, your tone would tend to be more formal and respectful. However, that formal tone might sound distant and cold if used with colleagues.

You can achieve a conversational tone in your messages by following these guidelines:

• Avoid obsolete and pompous language. Business language used to be much more formal than it is today, and some out-of-date phrases remain. You can avoid using such language if you ask yourself, "Would I say this if I were talking to someone face to face?" Similarly, avoid using big words, trite expressions and overly complicated sentences to impress others. Such pompous language sounds self-important.

• Avoid preaching and bragging. Few things are more irritating than people who think they know everything and that others know nothing. If you do need to remind your audience of something obvious try to work the information in casually, perhaps in the middle of a paragraph where it will sound like a secondary comment rather than a major revelation. Also, avoid bragging about your accomplishments or those of your organization.
• Be careful with intimacy. Most business messages should avoid intimacy, such as sharing personal details or adopting a casual and unprofessional tone. However, when you do have a close relationship with your audience, such as among the members of a close-knit team, a more intimate tone is sometimes appropriate and even expected.
• Be careful with humor. Humor can be an effective tool to inject interest into dry subjects or take the sting out of negative news. However, use it with great care. The humor must be connected to the point you are trying to make. Business messages are not a forum for sharing jokes. Never use humor in formal messages or when you are communicating across cultural boundaries. Humor can easily backfire and divert attention from your message. 

Using Plain English

Plain English is a way of presenting information in a simple unadorned style so that your audience can easily grasp your meaning without struggling through specialized, technical or convoluted language, because it is close to the way people normally speak. Plain English is easily understood by anyone with an 8th or 9th grade education. The Plain English Campaign (a nonprofit group in England campaigning for clear language) defines plain English as language "that the intended audience can read, understand and act upon the first time they read it." You can see how this definition shows respect for your audience.

End