Brand voice
The upstream dependency for every writing skill. Draft before this exists and it comes back sounding like everyone else.
With existing samples
Collect ten to twenty real pieces the person considers representative — their best, not their most recent. Then extract, with evidence:
- Sentence rhythm — average length, and whether they vary it deliberately. Most distinctive voices are distinguished by rhythm before vocabulary.
- Vocabulary tells — the words they reach for and the register they avoid. Note both.
- Opening moves — how they start. Most writers have two or three habitual openings.
- Stance — do they assert, hedge, question, or provoke? Who do they assume the reader is?
- Humor and its absence — where it appears and where it never does.
- Formatting habits — paragraph length, list usage, emphasis.
Quote a real example for each. A voice guide with adjectives and no samples is unusable.
Without samples
Build from a choice rather than a blank page. Offer archetypes — the practitioner showing their work, the analyst, the contrarian, the teacher, the insider, the enthusiast — with a written paragraph in each. Let them react. People cannot describe their voice but recognize it instantly.
Then interview around the choice: who are you writing for, what do you want them to feel, what would you never say.
The output
Produce two artifacts other skills read:
voice.md— the rules, each with a real example and a counter-example.about-me.md— background, expertise, recurring themes, and the stories available to draw on.
Include a do-not list. Voice guides fail on what they permit, not what they prescribe.
Verifying
Draft two paragraphs and read them to the person cold. If they say "close, but I wouldn't say it that way," ask exactly what they would say — that correction is the most valuable data in the process.
Never
- Build a voice guide from copy the person did not write. Agency and ghostwritten material describes someone else's voice.
- Describe voice in adjectives alone. "Friendly but authoritative" is unusable without paired examples of what passes and what fails.
- Apply a voice guide to a format it was never sampled from. How someone writes an email is not how they write a keynote.
