Voice and Tone
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The voice and tone that we use influence how people think and feel about MongoDB.
Voice is our style and communicates our personality to the user.
Tone is our mood and communicates our attitude about the subject to the user.
The words we choose—and the ways we use them—should reflect our goals, which include the following things:
Build trust.
Inspire confidence.
Make things easier.
Develop a relationship with MongoDB users.
No matter where our words land, they should sound like us.
Voice and Tone Attributes
At MongoDB, we shape our words with the following voice and tone attributes:
Voice | Tone |
|---|---|
|
|
These attributes make our documentation:
Empathetic without sugarcoating it.
Empowering and proactive.
Committed and energetic.
Playful, but professional.
Steadfast, but open and approachable.
A trusted voice of reality and experience.
Best Practices
Consider the following best practices for voice and tone:
Best practices | Use | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
Write to the user by using second person and imperative mood. Users are more engaged with content when it talks to them directly. You talk to users directly by using second person, addressing the user as you. When you use second person with the imperative mood (in which the subject you is understood) and active voice, you make the text clear, concise, and direct. | Click Yes to accept the license agreement. | The license agreement is accepted when the user clicks Yes. |
Write in active voice. Active voice makes the performer of the action (usually the user) the subject of the sentence. Active-voice sentences are more direct and easier to understand than passive-voice sentences. | After you install the software, restart the computer. | After the software has been installed, the computer can be restarted. |
Use present tense. Users read content to help them perform tasks or to gather information. These activities occur in the users' present time, so the present tense is appropriate in most content. | The product prompts you to verify the deletion. | The product will prompt you to verify the deletion. |
Be impactful and speak directly to a pain point. | Stop letting maintenance of your database take time away from developing your app. | MongoDB Atlas is built for agile teams who'd rather spend time building apps than managing databases. |
It's about them, not us, and promises a solution. | Unlock the value of your data with a scalable, serverless data lake. | One of the benefits of Atlas Data Lake is that it's serverless and scalable. |
Be simple and direct. | Why MongoDB Atlas? Flexible and scalable document database. Available as a fully managed service. | Are you looking for a global cloud database service that deploys fully managed document databases? |
Write in a way that the user wants to be spoken to. Use helpful words and phrases that are informative, simple, clear, and easy to understand. | Enter the IP address of the host. Click My Server to complete the configuration. | The monitoring engine couldn't connect to the server. Make sure the information is correctly entered. |
Avoid being overly enthusiastic. | You successfully configured all databases for monitoring. | Congratulations!! ALL of your databases are now being monitored!! |
Be careful about laying blame. Don’t take the blame for a negative situation. Don’t lay the blame of the negative situation on the user. | The system could not validate your account. Enter your credentials again. | Either you didn't enter your credentials correctly, or the system timed out. Please enter your credentials again. |
In positive situations, be encouraging and offer next steps. Don’t take credit for the user’s success. | Configuration successful. You can now commission and decommission servers on-demand. | Congrats! Our system is so easy to use that you are now able to commission and decommission servers on-demand |
In negative situations, be clear about the problem and how the user can fix it. Don’t ask the user to trust us without providing more information. | Your account details and database IP address range don’t match. Ensure that the IP addresses on the Account Details page are correct. | The database configuration failed. |