Consistency in Voice Is Important When Building Knowledge Content

When confronted with a request for consistency in their writing, most writers, authors, and creatives love to trot out Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote from Self-Reliance,

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency, a great soul has nothing to do.”

And since Emerson loved to continue in that vein for some time (read the full quoted text here), those who embrace brevity as wit tend to run with Oscar Wilde’s:

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

With all due respect to both Emerson and Wilde, who were brilliant writers of the 19^th century, I must say to their advocates that when it comes to technical communication, marketing, and audience accessibility, Emerson and Wilde can stuff it.

Building knowledge base content – whether it’s technical documentation, APIs, SDKs, user manuals, or simply a quick technology overview – is a job that requires consistency. When writing content for a product or suite of products, the user-facing content has to be smooth, easy to read, see, and adopt.

The words and images written can’t snag the reader’s mind and get them caught up on minor inconsistencies. The readers of product documentation and user-facing content aren’t interested in the mysteries of human interaction – they want to know why their Fitbit isn’t syncing to their account, and how to fix it.

What’s even worse: content that’s inconsistent can increase a user’s frustration with the site, or even convince them the product’s designers and authors didn’t really have a clue about what they were doing. And more users are looking to the existing documentation of a product to decide if they’re willing to spend money. And inconsistencies in voice and style acts on user perceptions like a splinter snagging the wool of a sweater. It’s subtle, but it’s annoying – and it makes processing that information just a little harder than it should be.

That’s not to say creativity and passion aren’t a part of the knowledge base experience. In fact, knowing HOW people access information and walking through a use case scenario on when, how, why, and where a user comes to the knowledge base and support center is the critical component of writing anything that a user or client might see.

On the contrary, creativity is REQUIRED when you want to make things consistent. You have to know what voice you want to present, whether you want a formal or informal dialogue with your audience, or if you need a crisp, clean, no-fuss no muss approach. The difference is, once you and your teams across all the communications channels agree on what that consistent standard LOOKS like, it can’t change without full consensus and buy-in from the group. Editors, reviewers, contributors, SMEs – if even one person colors outside the lines, it makes it all the harder to maintain the audience’s belief in the content.

Here’s The Book. (THUD). Read That. It’s In There. Have Fun. (Less Polite: RTFM)

You can’t start out expecting a new users to walk themselves through your site content and find what they’re looking for. You have to make the content both relevant AND accessible. And that means you have to create content that syncs up and dances with all of the other content on your site.

So, you have to make your content consistent. Otherwise, you're expecting a user to wade through pages and pages of content to get to anything remotely relevant to what they want to learn. It's just easier to go somewhere else than it is to plonk through a six hundred page tome for a single nugget of information.(Sure, some people think that's fun, but most don't want a background proof of WHY MySQL databases aren't sufficient for wide scalability on a diversified platform scale - they just want to know what database system to use.)

The alternative is dropping a massive tome of knowledge on the user’s desk (metaphorically) and expecting them to read it in a single sitting.

Doing this with your content means your users won’t ever access that wealth and breadth of knowledge. When you’re starting out to find more about a product or service, you never go for the expert manual. You take the path of least resistance, and you get hooked on your own personal needs, rather than the one-size fits all approach.

Users NEVER pick up a technical manual to read it start to finish. They run through the index to find how to do a specific task, and then use that section to build out a specific knowledge base around their preferred tasking. They learn by finding contextual answers to their needs – not by absorbing huge bodies of work.

If you don’t believe this is how the human mind works, try this little experiment. Sign into Google and search for any single subject pertaining to water, and click the third search result. Spend fifteen minutes poking around with that search, and see if where you ended up has more than a distant relationship to where you originally started your search. You’re guaranteed not to do the same pathway twice, even if you find the same content, or just slightly different content.

People don’t want to read the technical version of War and Peace. They want instant knowledge gratification and they want it now. And when they get the instant gratification, they discover off-shoots of knowledge they want to know more about…and it helps reinforce the memory of the knowledge they just accessed.

That’s why knowledge content offered by companies with technical products have to be accessible and written to keyword and SEO standards. No user wants to sift through fifty pages of content to find what they’re looking for when they could simply find a short blog post somewhere else that gives them that answer.

As a result, when tasked to build separate content for artificially divided audiences, it not only doubles the delivery time required for building content for deliverables, it also requires that everyone in the chain responsible for creating that content is up to speed on the requirements AND has the background to maintain it.

Examples of success in consistency are not hard to find, either. The Economist is a highly respective news analysis magazine that both editorializes and presents news. However, the Economist does not have writer bylines. Writers for the Economist are expected to maintain the standards of the Economist’s Style guide (and if you’re as nerdy about words as I am, I highly recommend a perusal, available here). These standards not only give a wide range of writers, editors, and contributors structure, but also maintain consistent voice across the entire magazine's body of work that establishes both trust with their audience, and consistent, trackable voice.

And when I say “artificially divided audiences”, I mean that when we look at who’s supposed to read our brilliant writing and painstakingly crafted videos and user communities, we think of the doctoral students, the new and old-school developers, the marketing and sales teams, and the product management groups as separate entities all with wildly divergent needs.

How the heck do you actually MAKE things consistent?

By creating use case scenarios that connect to more than four different audiences, and making the content available to all of them.

In a practical sense, this means not only analyzing the user audience, but also implementing common sense practices.

The most important? Making sure more than two sets of eyes reviews all user-facing documentation.

The second most important? Building consistency and accessibility at the grammatical level.

An example of that consistency is also one that shows up no matter what content I write, and it’s make sure.

The word ensure is one that I always change when I write or edit content. The reason? My first job was working in localization. If English is not the native language of the reader, then “ensure” and “insure” are very easy to confuse (and are for many English speakers as well). One means to be certain, and the other is to provide material backup in case of failure. (One is also a supplemental diet shake, and the other is something you need to do to help pay for medical and dental bills.)

Compounding the problem: the words “ensure” and “insure” are a single letter apart, whereas “make sure” is significantly different enough from either of the others to clearly communicate the intention.

WARNING: [Ensure] that the database is backed up completely to an external source before starting this process.

Saying the previous sentence into my phone results in the following:

Different people's voice inflections are so similar both when spoken and in print that Google Voice showed this result. Predictably, replacing the word ensure with the phrase make sure gives the following results:

You might say, “Well, duuuh. Google Voice is a stupid machine that just polls the most likely results and picks the top based on context.” The worst-kept secret is that the reason Google’s results work that way is BECAUSE the human mind filters in the exact same way – on context, and on personal preferences.

In general, Google’s search engine - just like the human brain - delivers the most likely results. So if someone’s frame of reference makes them check what the writer means by “ensure”, they won’t understand why someone wants them to take out a policy on the software database.

It’s not that big a deal, one might say. But combine hundreds of similar inconsistencies in language, tone, word choice, punctuation and search functionality, and you may wonder why you built a knowledge base at all.

The secret? All of our “diverse” audiences actually aren’t that diverse at all.

In the world of knowledge base research and search, we don’t seek our answers based on a waterfall hierarchy of information lessons. Each individual user and audience automatically customizes their learning experience based solely on their needs, desires, and wants – just like someone sifting through stacks of books or articles to find the best sources for their story.

Our audience (viewers, readers, consumers) all arrive at the same place, and they all need one thing: more information. The ease of access is exacerbated by content that varies wildly in voice, labeled audience, tone, TWAs (three-world acronyms) and context.

The only way to create a cohesive, trusted source for that content is to create standards that make sure the content is accessible to all levels of experience and interest, regardless of the depth of technicality or interest.

If you provide consistency, clarity, and an easy library that lets everyone find what they’re looking for, your site and product content becomes a resource that serves not only as a teaching or training tool, but also as an integral component of your product marketing and user adoption models.

Your users want your organization to be their source for knowledge about your product. To be a strongly trusted source, you have to build style guide in your organization that models the standard of “good” communication regardless of audience, and maintain a review process flexible enough to allow for creativity while still maintaining consistency and excellence in content.

Their 19^th century sneers at consistency notwithstanding, even Emerson and Wilde wanted their audience to pick up their books and know (without looking at the spine) whose work they were reading, and why; to learn, to be inspired, and to be excited to read more.

And that’s a goal authors of any century can understand.