Tone & Voice

Senior-level HR executives are busier than ever. The five-year business plan is dead. We can barely predict three months into the future. Whether managing their organizations’ response to the ongoing changes in the marketplace or helping to shape strategic considerations for the future, they have countless demands competing for their attention. And they need information that will help their organizations today.

Mindful of this, our messaging should be both informative and respectful of the reader’s time. Additionally, our messaging needs to assert SHRM as the authoritative voice in the space, so executives continue to trust and value SHRM as their #1 resource.

This can be accomplished through the judicious use of facts and statistics, whenever possible. This ensures that we’re providing fact-based information and avoiding pretension.

Creating high-quality content also requires clear language that educates and informs our members. Resist the urge to sound smart. As Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a former Princeton University professor and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in his ironically titled paper, Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity, needless complexity in language creates a negative impression with your audience rather than a favorable one.

Or as George Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language”:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, 
will ask himself at least four questions.

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?