Natural

In a sector like ours, people expect a corporate culture. Not here. We’re large, commercially focused and offer a premium service, but that doesn’t mean we’re pretentious.

To deliver on our premium promise, we speak to people as our equals. Imagine what you would say to a client or colleague in a meeting – that’s how we want to write. Because we’re professional, we avoid colloquialisms and slang. Instead, we make deliberate choices on our sentence structure and grammar to mirror natural speech.

To sound natural

Use the active voice
Use personal pronouns
Include contractions
Mix up sentence lengths.

Use the active voice

The active voice tells the reader who or what is performing an action, like this: ‘we published data’ not ‘the data was published’. It’s a concise and direct way to communicate and more typical of natural speech.

PASSIVE	ACTIVE
This report will be written by the head auditor.	The head auditor will write the report.
The meeting will be chaired by Jane Bloggs.	Jane Bloggs will chair the meeting.
Last year, new tax legislation was introduced by the government.	The government introduced new tax legislation last year.

Use personal pronouns

These are words like ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘you’, rather than ‘the business’. We use personal pronouns when it’s appropriate as they help us talk directly to the reader. The possessive pronoun ‘your business’ is also more inclusive than ‘the business’.

Include contractions

Contractions are when you replace a letter with an apostrophe, like ‘it’s’ rather than ‘it is’. When you speak aloud, you would normally say ‘I’ll do that’ rather than ‘I will do that’. That’s why we like to use contractions when it feels right. We can also swap between using them and not using them in the same document, because this is how people speak in real life.

Mix up sentence lengths

As well as making sure our sentences have fewer than 30 words (see ‘confident’), we need to vary our sentence lengths. This stops our writing feeling monotonous.