Writing Voice Guide

When To Use

Every draft Claude gives you sounds like everyone else's, and the people you are about to write to know how you write. A former colleague who sat next to you for six years will notice a message that is not yours in the first line. Run this once, before the profile and the first messages.

When Not To Use

If you have fewer than ten pieces you wrote and sent yourself, write a few real messages first; a guide built on three emails is a guess. To write to one person now, go to Reconnect Message and bring the guide later.

Inputs

• 10 to 20 pieces you wrote and sent: messages, emails from a personal account, posts, notes to friends in the trade. Pasted or uploaded.
• One message you are about to send, for the before and after
• Optional: words you already know you dislike If you have none of this, I start from five pieces you paste now and mark the guide as a first draft.

Approach

Your voice lives in your own sent writing, so the guide is built from that corpus and nothing Claude wrote. It is then set beside the public Signs of AI writing guide from Wikipedia's WikiProject AI Cleanup, which lists the patterns readers recognise as machine text. One caution for this reader: much of what you wrote for years was in a company's voice. The failure it prevents is the reconnect note that opens with "I hope this finds you well" and three tidy bullet points, read in two seconds as a template.

Workflow

1. Ask at most three questions: which pieces are truly yours and unedited by a tool, who you will write to most in the next months (former colleagues, former clients, new contacts), and whether you write differently in messages and in posts.
2. Sort the corpus: writing in your own name, and writing in a corporate voice (announcements, client reports). Only the first kind feeds the guide. Mail from a former employer's mailbox stays out; use what you kept legitimately in your own accounts.
3. Pull out, each with one quoted example from your text: how you open, how you sign off, your sentence length range, how formal you are, how you ask for something, how you take a no.
4. List the words and phrases you use often, and the words you never use. A word is "never" only if it is absent from the whole corpus, and you confirm the list.
5. Build the AI-tell checklist by pattern, not by copying the page: inflated significance, stock openers and closers, lists of three by habit, vague attributions, hedges stacked on hedges, a summary that repeats the message.
6. Run the before and after on your one message: mark each change and the rule behind it, and leave your own phrasing alone where it already sounds like you.
7. Save it where later drafts can be checked against it: under a Topic in Settings > Memory, in a private Project, or as a file you paste.

Output Format

# Writing Voice Guide
Built from: [number] pieces in my own name, [date range] | Kept in: [memory Topic / private Project / file]
## How I write
| Trait | My pattern | Example from my own text |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | [pattern] | "[quote]" |
| Asking for something | [pattern] | "[quote]" |
| Signing off | [pattern] | "[quote]" |
## Words I use / words I never use
| I use | I never use |
|---|---|
| [word or phrase] | [word or phrase] |
## AI-tell checklist
- [ ] [pattern]: [what it looks like in a draft]
## Before and after
| Before | After | Why |
|---|---|---|
| [line] | [line] | [rule] |
## Decision
[Your name] confirms the never-use list and the checklist by [date], and looks at the guide again after [number] real messages.

Done When

• Every trait has an example quoted from writing in your own name.
• The never-use list is confirmed by you.
• The before and after shows each change with its reason.
• The guide is saved where later drafts can be checked against it.

Quality Bar

• Only your own writing goes in the corpus; never other people's messages.
• Corporate-voice pieces are set aside, not averaged in.
• The guide checks drafts and talking points; it never lets Claude write or send in your name.
• Your voice comes from your own sent writing; the final words are yours and you send them.

Next

Run start-linkedin-headline (LinkedIn Headline) to rewrite the first line people see about you.

About the makers

This pack is made by Polar Bear, a consultancy built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. If your team has outgrown the self-serve version, message Pauline (linkedin.com/in/paulinebertry).