Do you leave your fingerprints on your business writing?

What I mean is, how much of ‘you’ comes through in your business writing? I was thinking about this after reading a style guide, the ultimate authority on what counts as good business writing…

There’s a fuzzy line between counsel and control. In my training courses, I encourage delegates to apply good practice in their writing. Avoid the passive, use first and second person pronouns, keep sentences short (unless you’re following the widely-shared teachings of Gary Provost when it comes to playing with sentence length, of course). That sort of thing.

This is in the spirit of counsel, but still constrains: applying good practices makes our writing more similar, less individual. Style guides often go further, setting out an organisation’s preferences and the right way to write. If good practice is like telling people not to turn up to a big client meeting in a Hawaiian shirt, style guides tell you which three colours and cuts of shirt you can choose from.

The Economist recently changed its house style to refer to data in the singular, not plural (data is important, not data are important). And I saw an article about banishing jargon from UK Government websites – great idea – but it went further than confusing words, banning the use of metaphor, for example, to make really sure policies are clear to all.

The question I have is how much flair, personality and individuality do we want to come through in our business writing? When does a consistent corporate character become unsurprising, uninteresting and unexceptional?

I ask delegates to start by thinking about the reader, and what she wants from their writing. Being clear, concise and relevant are all good things. Organising your ideas, structuring your writing and making it easy to understand? Also helpful. But what about vivid language, metaphor and more creative techniques?

There’s no right and wrong here, and it always depends on your goals, the business context, and what your reader needs or wants from your writing. But it’s worth asking yourself whether all this guidance is steering you in the right direction, or cramping your style. As we’re fast realising, diversity brings all sorts of benefits, and when it comes to writing, novelty and surprise give the reader an endorphin boost too. In a world where AI-tools are competing with human creativity, perhaps we should be celebrating our uniquely human quirks. And leaving big, fat, sticky fingerprints on everything we write.