When should digital content break the rules?

Content standards. House style. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation guides. If you work in digital content, you likely follow several guidelines every day.

 

For the most part, documents like these are essential to create user-centred, engaging, and useable content.

 

But are there times when creating brilliant digital content pushes against the official rule book? Let’s look at some classic guidelines on grammar, voice and tone, to see if there are times when great content calls for breaking the rules.

 

 

To create focus

 

“Never use the passive when you can use the active.” – George Orwell.

 

One of the first pieces of writing advice many of us get is to avoid the passive voice.

Passive voice looks like this: “the good news was celebrated by us.”

Active voice looks like this: “we celebrated the good news.”

 

Active voice tends to feel clearer, more dynamic, and more compelling. But should we follow Orwell and never use it?

 

When you need to shine a spotlight on important information, passive voice can be your friend. Let’s say you’re writing about changes to government benefits, as part of an advice portal for people who are looking for work.

 

Using the active voice, you might say, “The government has cancelled the uplift in Universal Credit.” But this places the emphasis on the government, which isn’t useful or relevant to your user. They need to know how changes to benefits affect them, and they want to find that information as quickly, easily, and simply as possible.

 

Instead, you might say: “The uplift to Universal Credit has been cancelled.” The passive voice can be unwieldy, but it can also put the focus where it should be.  

 

 

To create clarity

 

Tone of voice guidelines are a vital element of your charity brand. While every charity has a different voice, it’s striking how many charities have defined attributes like “approachable”, “informal”, “unstuffy”, or “relatable” as key to their voice.

 

Whether you’re publishing simple legal information, accessible health advice, or non-judgemental financial guidance, it’s vital to come across as approachable. To put that into practice, your style guide is likely to recommend using contractions like isn’t, haven’t and wouldn’t. They’re friendlier and more conversational. But they can also be confusing.

 

Researchers at GOV.UK, found that users found negative contractions harder to read. People who are in a hurry, reading in low light conditions, tired, distracted, dyslexic, or have a low level of literacy are particularly likely to misread them as the opposite.  When telling someone not to do something, it’s clearer and more emphatic to say “do not” than “don’t.”

 

So even if your tone of voice guidelines are pushing you towards the friendliness of shouldn’t, wouldn’t or couldn’t, clarity tells us to spell it out in full. 

 

The only rule? Language that derails people is against the rules.

 

 

To increase understanding

 

Ever been told not to split your infinitives? That’s a prescriptivist approach to grammar. Never mind that it’s a nonsensical rule imported from Latin, prescriptivism says we mustn’t do it.

 

Prescriptive grammar looks like: 20 items or fewer (because that’s technically correct).

Descriptive grammar looks like: 20 items or less (because that’s what most people say and understand).

 

A prescriptivist approach to grammar says that we should keep following the rules, no matter what. Descriptivism gives us permission to go with the flow of how people really use language.

 

It might be grammatically correct to have a sign over a supermarket checkout saying 10 items or fewer, but that’s not how most people use English. Usefulness, useability, and accessibility should be the test for our content, not grammar handbooks.

 

If it’s clearer, simpler, and more widely understood, it breaks the rule but passes the test.

 

 

To increase familiarity

 

You probably don’t announce that you’re on your way to urinate, but you might say you need to pee. When it comes to the language of health, it’s important to use words people are familiar with.

 

Familiar terms: Go to the toilet, do a poo.

Unfamiliar terms: Defecate, pass a bowel movement.

 

Some people won’t like this language. They’ll say we should use the “proper” words. But whatever the technical terms are as defined by medical dictionaries, “urine”, “stool” or “defecate” simply aren’t words that everyone uses or understands.

 

What’s more important: a few people’s displeasure, or making potentially life-saving information easy to understand? As NHS Digital have found: "A few people don’t like the words, but they help lots of people understand.”

 

 

Don’t break the rules, change them

 

George Orwell’s six rules for writing are an excellent guide. But Orwell doesn’t just lay down rules for writing. He urges us to break them, too.

 

“Break any of these rules sooner than say something barbarous.” – George Orwell.

 

There’s a lesson here for anyone who creates content and it’s all about meeting your users’ needs.

 

In the examples above, breaking a rule has been called before because it makes content clearer, more actionable or more familiar. It all comes down to user needs.

 

Great content gives users exactly what they need. If following a rule of spelling, grammar or tone means you stray from user needs, then that rule needs breaking.  

 

A rule that asks you to forget user needs is a rule that needs breaking.

 

 

User needs come first

 

“#1 – start with user needs.” Gov.uk design principles

 

There’s a reason that so many leading content guidelines, like gov.uk’s design principles, open with “put users first.”

 

When you put user needs first, the rest will follow. You’ll never need to worry about breaking the rules again.