5 exercises — distinguish formal stakeholder communication from informal team chat and master the vocabulary of each register.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A message is being sent to the CTO and external stakeholders about a service outage. Which message is most appropriate?
Stakeholder communication requires formal register: complete sentences, precise timestamps, professional vocabulary ("service disruption", "remediation", "postmortem"), and commitment to follow-up. Option A uses informal vocabulary ("prod", "probs", emoji) inappropriate for a CTO/external audience. Option C uses abbreviations and sentence fragments unsuitable for formal communication. Option D is brief and direct but lacks the precision and professionalism expected in executive communication.
2 / 5
A developer is messaging their team on Slack to ask for help with a deployment blocker. Which message matches the informal Slack register?
Slack messages to teammates use informal register: lowercase, no full stop, contractions, direct language, quick question. Option B is natural Slack communication. Option A is absurdly over-formal for a team chat. Option C is telegraphic (appropriate for a ticket summary but cold for a Slack request). Option D is formal and complete — suitable for an email but stilted for Slack.
3 / 5
Which version of this finding is most appropriate for a formal incident report?
Formal technical writing uses nominalisation: "investigation revealed" (not "we found out"), "misconfiguration" (not "wrong config"), "service degradation" (not "things broke"), "primary contributing factor" (precise causal language). This register is required in postmortems, SLA breach reports, and audit-facing documents. Options A and D use informal phrasal verbs and vague vocabulary. Option C is too terse for a formal report.
4 / 5
A formal change management document needs to record who approved a deployment. Which sentence is most appropriate for formal documentation?
Formal documentation often uses passive voice with a named agent ("was approved by the infrastructure team lead") — this is more precise about role than personal name ("Jake"), which may not be meaningful to all readers. Passive voice in formal documents depersonalises actions appropriately. Option A is correct but uses a first name (informal/potentially ambiguous in large organisations). Option C is vague. Option D is informal and lacks precision.
5 / 5
Which sentence contains a register mismatch inappropriate for a client-facing SLA report?
"Basically", "ran out of servers", and "we've sorted it" are informal phrases entirely inappropriate for a formal SLA report sent to clients. "Sorted it" is a phrasal verb typical of casual speech. "Ran out of servers" lacks the technical precision expected in formal incident documentation. Options A, B, and D use appropriate formal vocabulary and structure for client-facing SLA communications.