Page 152 - How to write effective business English your guide to excellent professional communication by Fiona Talbot

Paper is here to stay 141

saw in Chapter 5), this still impacts on letter-writing style. It’s con-
fusing to have overly different writing styles within organizations.
Look at this Tweet, sent by a train company to a customer (I’ve
anonymized the details) who had tweeted to complain about a de-
layed train:
TranscountryRail (@TranscountryRail)

@mariexyz I can see you were 11 mins delayed into London
Bridge, I do apologise for this Marie. Jon

We see the apology the complainant expects. But the language is still
quite formal if we look at it alongside the language used by a fast
food chain in reply to a complaint by a customer on Twitter (details
anonymized) accompanied by a photo of a newly opened bag of
crisps (a UK English word; ‘chips’ in US and other varieties of English):

Todxyz (@todxyz_)
Are you joking @fastfoodtogo? I was expecting a little
more than that when I opened my bag of potato crisps
#disappointing

FastFoodToGo (@fastfoodtogo)
@todxyz_ That does look a little stingy! Sorry, did you show
our Team Members?
‘Stingy’ is a colloquial word for ‘mean’ and denotes ‘under-filled’ in
this context. The informality of social media attunes readers to ex-
pect this type of conversational interaction – where companies
aren’t afraid to express empathy or say sorry where things go wrong.
If the vocabulary and tone in corporate letters is completely dif-
ferent from a company’s social media voice, can you see how this
can bewilder readers? It undermines brand consistency – and even
credibility. You might ‘like’ and trust the company’s social media
voice and ‘dislike’, even mistrust, a ‘formal’ letter’s distant tone.
Do any of these points strike a particular chord with you or
your colleagues? They could make a springboard for wider
discussion.