Voice & Messaging

Voice principles

Five rules to write by.

1. 

   01

   Specific beats poetic.

   When you have to choose between a beautiful sentence and an exact one, choose the exact one. Specifics — names, places, materials, hours — earn the right to be lyrical later.

2. 

   02

   Sensory, not scenic.

   Smell, sound, light, weight. We want the reader inside the room, not looking at it from across a magazine page.

3. 

   03

   Confident, not boastful.

   We can say what we are. We don’t have to say we’re the best. Statements over superlatives.

4. 

   04

   Warm, not folksy.

   Hospitable, like a good innkeeper. Not down-home, not aw-shucks. Never y’all.

5. 

   05

   Plain when it matters most.

   Pricing, hours, what’s included, how to book — answered in the fewest words possible. Earn the right to be lyrical elsewhere.

Tone spectrum

Same voice, four registers.

The voice is constant; tone shifts by context. Use this spectrum to calibrate before you write.

Writing rules

Ten that keep us in voice.

1. 01 — Name the place. If a piece of copy doesn’t reference Hayward, Main Street, the Namekagon, the Northwoods, or something equally specific, it probably belongs to another brand.
2. 02 — Sentences earn their length. Long sentences are fine when they carry image and rhythm. Short ones are always fine.
3. 03 — One specific beats three adjectives. “Plush seating” > “warm, inviting, comfortable seating.”
4. 04 — Use sentence case for headlines. Title Case is for legal copy and trademarks. Sentence case reads warmer.
5. 05 — Oxford comma, em dashes, and ampersands. Yes, yes, sparingly.
6. 06 — Numerals from 10 up; spelled-out below ten, except for pricing and timestamps.
7. 07 — Use “you,” not “our members.” The reader is one person, sitting at one desk, choosing one thing.
8. 08 — Brand name styling: “The Lumber Exchange” on first mention, “the Lumber Exchange” thereafter. Never “LX” in body copy; only as a designed mark.
9. 09 — Avoid emoji in long-form copy. One in a social caption is fine if it earns its place; never two.
10. 10 — When the page would be embarrassing read aloud at a dinner in Hayward, rewrite it.

Vocabulary

Use these. Don’t use these.

Taglines & headlines

A few we’ll use a lot.

Sample copy

How it sounds in the wild.

Use these to calibrate, not as templates to fill in. The voice is in the choices, not the phrasing.