# Voice and Tone — a fill-in-the-blanks guide your agent can follow *Part of the Wasser AI Academy skills library. Free to use.* **What it is:** the worksheet version of a working voice guide. Seven sections, the mining prompts already written, and blanks where your material goes. Fill it in once and any model that reads it stops defaulting to the generic marketing voice. **How to use it:** work top to bottom, filling the blanks with *your* material. Do not skip to the end and write adjectives; the whole method is extraction, not invention. Budget about forty minutes. **Install (once it is filled in):** save it as `~/.claude/skills/voice-and-tone/SKILL.md` (create the folder) so Claude Code loads it whenever it writes something user-facing. Using Codex or another agent? Put it in your project and add one line to `AGENTS.md`: *read `voice-and-tone.md` before writing any user-facing copy.* **Companion guide:** [Voice and tone, a guide the model can actually follow](/resources/workflows/voice-and-tone-guide.html) explains why each section is shaped the way it is. --- ## Before you start: the two rules that make this work 1. **A voice rule is only real if a stranger could check whether the copy obeyed it.** "Be confident" is not checkable. "Never use the word *unlock*" is. Push every rule toward the second kind. 2. **You already have a voice. Do not decide one.** Everything below gets filled from writing you have already published or sent. This is archaeology, not authorship. Gather five to ten samples before you write anything: sent emails, a page you were happy with, a long message to a client. Things you actually wrote, not drafts a tool produced. --- ## 1 — The audience, in one paragraph Not a segment. One person you can picture. > **Fill in:** My reader is _____ years old, works as _____ at a _____ sized company. They already pay for _____. They are skeptical about _____. They found me through _____. What they are quietly worried about is _____. They are short on time and they are not a beginner. Every rule below points back at this paragraph. If a rule does not serve this person, cut it. --- ## 2 — The rules Eight to thirteen. Each one gets a title, a sentence of explanation, and **a real quote from something you actually published**. A rule with no example is an adjective wearing a numbered hat. Use this mining prompt to draft them, then argue with the result: > Here are [N] things I wrote. Don't compliment them. Tell me: what sentence patterns repeat? What kind of metaphor do I reach for? How long are my sentences, and do they vary? What words appear often? What words would *never* appear in my writing, based on what you see? Give me ten candidate rules, each with a quote from these samples as evidence. You will get eight decent rules and two wrong ones. **Where the model got you wrong, write your objection down as its own rule.** Your correction of a mischaracterization is a sharper description of your voice than anything you would have volunteered. > **Fill in, one block per rule:** > > ### Rule N. _____ > _____ (one or two sentences on what this means and why) > > > "_____" — from _____ Rules worth considering, if they are true for you (steal the shape, not the content): - Lead with the risk or the caveat before the benefit. - Short declarative sentences for anything anyone might quote. - Second person, addressed to a competent adult, never a student. - Metaphors from the reader's world, not from technology. - Show the work rather than claiming the expertise. - Admit the limits of the thing you are selling. - Every claim carries a specific a skeptic would accept. - Vary sentence length; three same-length sentences in a row reads as machine-written. --- ## 3 — The forbidden list The most load-bearing section in the file, and the fastest to fill. **Method:** find one AI draft you rejected. Read it and write down every word that made you wince. That list will beat any generic "words to avoid" article, because it is specific to what *you* cannot stand. > **Fill in — hype vocabulary (aim for 15 to 25):** > _____, _____, _____, _____, _____, _____, _____, _____ > > **Fill in — over-promises (anything asserting the future will not change):** > _____, _____, _____, _____ A common starting set for the first list: *unlock, seamless, supercharge, empower, next-level, revolutionary, game-changing, cutting-edge, leverage* (as a verb), *synergy, disrupt, transformative, at scale, enterprise-grade, paradigm shift, future-proof, best-in-class, world-class, harness the power of, take it to the next level.* And for the second: *free for life, forever, always, never changes, guaranteed, lifetime updates, risk-free, 100%.* If a claim depends on nothing ever changing, rewrite it so it is true today and still true after a change. **Also ban the adjectives you would most like to be called.** If your writing has to announce that it is honest, warm, or measured, it is not. Demonstrate the quality with specifics and let the reader name it. Show, don't state, applies to your own adjectives first. --- ## 4 — Gold-standard samples Three to five passages you wrote, liked, and shipped. Under each one, say **why** it works. The why is what transfers to a model. > **Fill in:** > > ### Sample N — [where it appeared] > > "_____" > > Why this works: _____ --- ## 5 — Before and after rewrites This teaches faster than any rule, because it shows the move instead of describing it. Take a generic line, then your version. > **Fill in, three to six of them:** > > **Generic:** "_____" > **Mine:** "_____" > *Why:* _____ If you need source material, take a paragraph a model wrote for you, edit it by hand until you would send it, and use both versions. Your edits are the rules. --- ## 6 — The channel split Your voice on a landing page is not your voice in a client email is not your voice on camera. Say so explicitly, or a model will flatten all of them into the landing-page one. > **Fill in:** > > - **Written and published** (site, marketing, captions): _____ > - **Direct one-to-one** (client email, DM): _____ > - **Spoken** (video, calls, teaching): _____ > > **Default when unspecified:** _____ The one-to-one register is usually terser and less crafted than people expect. If a sentence sounds like it belongs on a landing page, it does not belong in a client email. --- ## 7 — The pre-flight checklist Put this **last** in the file. It is the freshest thing in context when writing starts, and it is how a stranger audits a draft without your taste. > **Fill in, adapting to your rules:** > > - [ ] I read this guide in full before writing. > - [ ] I read at least two nearby samples of the same kind of copy. > - [ ] I used no word from the forbidden list. > - [ ] I made no promise the future has to keep. > - [ ] Every claim has a specific a skeptic would accept. > - [ ] My sentence lengths vary. > - [ ] My "you" addresses a competent adult, and nothing here would make the reader feel stupid. > - [ ] I used the register for this channel, not the default one. > - [ ] If unsure on any of the above, I am returning a draft for review rather than publishing. --- ## Keeping it alive Date the file at the top so you can tell when it last matched reality. Then update it on a trigger, not a schedule: - Generated copy drifts in a way no rule covers. - You rewrite a major page and your voice moves with it. - **You hand-fix the same thing for the second time.** That is the loudest one. A repeated correction is a missing rule, which is the same principle behind the [reflexion loop](/resources/workflows/reflexion-loop.html). Keep the rules section tight. Past a few thousand words the middle gets skimmed by people and weighted less by models. Push history and retired sections to the bottom or into an archive file. --- ## The short version - **Extract, don't invent.** Fill every blank from writing you already published. - **Prohibitions beat adjectives.** If a stranger cannot check it, it is not a rule. - **Every rule needs a real quote** carrying it. - **Ban your own favourite adjectives** about yourself. Show the quality, never announce it. - **Load the guide before the first word,** not after the draft. Editing tone afterward is doing the work twice. - **Test it:** ask for the same paragraph with and without the guide. If you cannot tell them apart, your rules are still adjectives.