---
name: brand-voice
description: Captures how a person or brand actually writes and turns it into reusable voice instructions every other content skill draws from. Use this before drafting any content for a new brand or client, when output keeps coming back sounding generic, when several writers need to sound like one, or when a voice needs defining without existing samples to learn from.
---

# 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.