Thursday, June 7, 2018

copywriting - Which grammatical person should I use when writing to the user?



Say a user is signed in to my website and looking at his dashboard which may have a section for his/her incoming messages.


Should I label that section "My incoming messages", "Your incoming messages" or just "Incoming messages"?


When is it ok to use the first person, if at all, when displaying content to a user? For example, on facebook, it never says "My Friends" or "My Account". It just says "Friends" instead of "My Friends" or "John Doe" instead of "My Profile". On the other hand, on twitter, there are things labelled in the first person, such as "View my profile page".


The second person ("you") seems to be quite unavoidable, especially when describing consequences to users. Example "Clicking this button will sign you out", or "Are you sure you want to delete this message?".


What about in a mobile app, does the advice change?




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