10 Essential Tips for Writing Effective Employee Newsletters

10 Essential Tips for Writing Effective Employee Newsletters

We all know bad writing when we see it: poor grammar, disconnected ideas, unstructured arguments, typos, etc. But writing clearly isn’t as easy as it seems; like all tasks, it takes careful planning and attention to detail. 

Many of the employee newsletter writing tips we’re sharing come from the wonderful book, Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup. If you’d like to take your internal communications writing to the next level, we cannot recommend this book enough.

1. Create a voice and style guide for your internal communications

Before we get into any specific tips, it’s important to outline your writing strategy for internal communications. For effective internal communications, consistency is key: by using familiar language, structure, and style across your internal communications, your employees will be able to read easier and absorb information quicker.

We encourage you to create your own Voice/Tone/Style guide—or to adapt an existing company style guide for your internal communications. While not as comprehensive as an internal communication plan or internal communication content strategy, your style guide will outline things like:

• Sentence and paragraph length
• Common errors, typos, grammatical errors 
• Reading comprehension level of the audience
• Company-specific vocabulary and terminology
• Writing style for your internal communications—do you write formally or informally? Do you address the reader directly or not? Does the writer identify themselves with “I” or “we”?

Feel free to take the tips and strategies above and incorporate them into your style guide. The goal is to make writing your company newsletter an easy, productive, and consistent practice.

2. Write for your specific audience

It’s almost impossible to write effectively if you don’t know your audience. Even as I write this now, I have an idea of who will be reading it and I choose my words and grammar accordingly. 

If you are unsure how to write your internal company newsletter or internal emails, think about the kind of writing that your audience (employees) would be familiar with. Are your employees technical-oriented engineers or people-first salespeople? Is your company culture formal or informal? 

All this information will help you decide what kind of language, tone, and grammar is most effective for your employee communications. You may also want to ask, “what will stand out to my target audience most?”.

And remember: you are also an employee at your company, with insight into what kind of writing is best-suited for writing an employee newsletter. 

3. Simple writing is clear writing

There is a tendency among budding writers to think that complex sentences are better than simple ones. After all, the more details you can include in a sentence to describe the idea the better, right?

However, seasoned writers know that the opposite is often true: simple sentences communicate ideas better than complex sentences. Readers should not have to struggle to discern the important information in your writing; simple writing strips away distractions so readers are only left with the information that matters most. 

When you are writing an internal company newsletter or email, always ask yourself: can this sentence be more succinct? Here are some simple ways you can keep your sentences short and sweet:

• Avoid long, introductory clauses in your sentences. The dependent clause in the previous paragraph (“When you are writing an internal company newsletter or email,”) roughly represents the longest introductory dependent clause you should use in your writing.
• Avoid interrupting the subject-verb connection. Every sentence contains a subject and predicate (verb), and readers navigate sentences by understanding how these two elements relate to each other. This means you should make your subject and predicate as clear as possible: in the second paragraph of this section, the sentence makes the subject and predicate clear immediately (“Season writers (subject) know (verb)….”). 

We’ll explore some best practices for writing your subject and predicate in the next section.

4. Instead of “subject/predicate”, think “action/actor”

Writing about business can get a little abstract. When encountering unclear sentences, readers can struggle to determine who is doing what. For example:

“Maintenance on our systems will take place on Friday.” 

You can easily avoid this confusion by ensuring that the subject of your sentence is the person/actor/object doing the action in the predicate of your sentence. To fix the example in the previous paragraph, you just have to reword it slightly: 

“The IT Team will be performing maintenance on our systems on Friday.”

It may seem obvious, but you should explicitly state the actor (subject) of your sentence when you can. Don’t leave it up to your employees to infer who you’re talking about! The second sentence is also an easily recognizable sentence pattern (transitive verb pattern), which means it’s easier understood by ESL employees and translated by softwares.

5. Be strict with your word choice

Whenever you write a sentence for another person, always ask yourself: “What is the minimum information required to communicate this idea?”. This question will help you strip away unnecessary words and phrases from your sentences, leaving only the most valuable information for your readers.

Compare these two sentences:

“As has been discussed by management, Company Ltd. has decided to implement a hybrid work strategy that will be implemented at the start of the next quarter.”

“Next quarter, Company Ltd. will implement a hybrid work strategy.”

Both sentences communicate the exact same information, but the second sentence is much clearer than the first. By stripping away unnecessary information and choosing simple sentence construction, you can ensure your internal communications are clear and effective.

6. Use passive voice strategically

Unless you’re a lawyer, you’ve probably been told to avoid passive voice. Passive voice is when the subject of your sentence isn’t performing the action, but is receiving the action:

“Employee evaluations will be conducted in the coming weeks by managers.”

Compare this sentence structure to a similar sentence written in active voice:

“Managers are conducting employee evaluations in the coming weeks.”

Both sentences convey the same information, but in two very different ways. To determine which is best suited for your current situation, you need to consider to whom you’re writing. A sentence with a subject that applies to the reader will always be more engaging than a sentence that doesn’t. 

So, in this example, if you’re writing to employees, use the passive construction to get their attention quickly. But if you’re writing to managers, use the active voice instead to put them in the subject position. 

7. Create an easy flow of ideas between your sentences

As demonstrated in the previous section, you can use different sentence structures to highlight information important to your readers. You can also do this to create an easy-to-follow flow between your sentences. 

Here are some simple rules for structuring your sentences when writing your company newsletter or emails:

• Open your sentences with information familiar to the reader: This will give readers an easy starting point to understand what you’re communicating to them.
• End sentences with new information: After the previous step, you can then mention new information towards the end of the sentence.
• Repeat the process: Start your next sentence by explaining the new information you introduced at the end of the previous sentence, and then connect it to new information at the end of the current sentence.

Here’s an example of an effective sentence flow:

“On Monday, your manager will explain the details of our new Fire Safety Plan. Our Fire Safety Plan will include information about emergency procedure, plan stakeholders, and legal requirements. To meet legal requirements, we are asking all employees to set time aside to learn our new Fire Safety procedures.”

Each subsequent sentence adds context to information mentioned at the end of the previous sentence. This simple structure is an incredibly effective way to write an employee newsletter.