Enhance and dial in your content’s tone

Freshen up your messaging with the tone grid

I was inspired by a recent post from Write with AI on using the tone grid to alter your writing. The concept is simple: You can place tone on X/Y axes:

• X-Axis: Loose to Tight

• Y-Axis: Irreverent to Professional

And then it struck me: most public affairs copy I’ve been exposed to, including the copy I’ve written over the years, tends to play it safe (read, boring). Very tight. Very professional. Obviously there are many reasons for why we tend to write straightforward content: we may be risk-averse, we let the lawyers get their way, or we just want to play it safe. Do this for too long, however, and you get used to writing this way.

With AI, you can mix it up, and consider different tones to make your content resonate.

This week, for fun, I pull up a real-world example of an issues-based campaign website, and use the tone grid to explore alternative copy. Before we get started, however, an important disclaimer:

I have a strict rule: I never publicly criticize someone else’s work. There are plenty of critics out there, and unless I have the full brief of an issue, it is unfair for me to criticize the work of others.

So, while I’m using a random campaign example I stumbled upon this week, my intent is narrow: illustrate how to use different tones to say the same thing. I’m not suggesting that the campaign team behind this campaign should use these examples, or that their work is boring. I do not have the full brief and am therefore, ill equipped to criticize their work.

With that out of the way, let’s see what we can do with the tone grid!

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The content we’ll work with is the sponsored ad and landing page from Google, which appeared in Politico’s London Playbook this week.

Tone Grid Prompt

But first, familiarize yourself with this opening prompt: