You can hear it now, can't you
There is a house style that has quietly taken over the internet. It unlocks things. It elevates experiences. It is passionate about delivering exceptional value in today's fast-paced world. It is not badly written, exactly. It is just written by nobody, about nothing, for everyone.
That style is what you get when you ask an AI to write marketing copy and give it nothing else to go on. It is the average of a billion brand pages, and the average of everything sounds like nothing.
In plain English
- Brand voice:
- The consistent personality your writing has, so everything sounds like the same company.
- Tone:
- How that voice shifts by situation. Same person, warmer in a welcome email than in a refund notice.
- Style guide:
- The written rules for how your brand writes. Spellings, formatting, words you use and words you avoid.
- Reference text:
- Real examples of your own writing that you give the AI to copy the feel of.
Show, do not describe
The instinct is to describe your voice: friendly but professional, approachable, expert. Every brand on earth has written that sentence. It tells a model almost nothing, because friendly-but-professional is exactly the region where the generic house style lives.
What works is examples. Find three to five pieces of your own writing that you are actually proud of. A newsletter that got replies. A product description you rewrote four times. An email to a customer where you sounded like yourself. Paste them in.
Below are five pieces of writing from my brand that I think represent us well.
Analyse them and describe the voice in a way another writer could copy:
- Average sentence length, and how much it varies.
- Formal or casual, and where exactly it sits between the two.
- Words and phrases that show up repeatedly.
- Words and constructions that never appear.
- How it opens a piece, and how it closes one.
- Any habits of humour, understatement or directness.
Be specific and quote from the samples. Do not use vague words like engaging,
authentic or professional unless you can point at the line that earns them.
SAMPLES:
[paste them]
What comes back is a first draft of your style guide, written from evidence rather than aspiration. Read it, cut what is wrong, keep it in a document. You will paste it into every writing session from now on.
Checkpoint
Describing your voice produces generic copy. Showing four or five real samples and asking the AI to reverse-engineer the rules produces something you can actually reuse.
The banned list
This is the highest-value thing in the lesson, and it takes ten minutes. Write down the words and constructions that mark copy as machine-written, and ban them explicitly, by name, in every prompt.
A starting list worth stealing: unlock, elevate, game-changer, in today's fast-paced world, revolutionise, seamless, robust, leverage, delve, cutting-edge, take it to the next level, transform your business, look no further, whether you are a beginner or a seasoned pro.
Also ban the shapes, not just the words. The three-item rhythm where every sentence lists three qualities. The opening rhetorical question. The closing paragraph that summarises what you just said and then invites the reader to embark on a journey.
Banned lists go stale. The tells shift as models change, and today's safe phrase becomes next year's giveaway. Add to yours every time a draft makes you wince, and reread it every couple of months.
โ Weak prompt
Prompt
Write an Instagram caption for our new coffee blend. Friendly, professional tone.
Output
Unlock a whole new coffee experience. Our new blend elevates your morning ritual with rich, bold notes that transform the everyday into something extraordinary.
Every tell at once: unlock, elevate, transform, and a rhythm that could sell insurance just as easily as coffee.
โ Good prompt
Prompt
Here is my voice guide and four captions that did well. Write one for the new blend, same voice. Never use unlock, elevate, transform, experience or journey. Short sentences. One concrete detail, no adjective stacking.
Output
New blend landed this morning. It is from a farm in Huila, it tastes like burnt sugar, and it is stubborn about needing a coarse grind. Ask us for a scoop to try.
Sounds like a person who has tasted it. Specific enough that no other roaster could post it word for word.
Write the rules down
Voice consistency is not a talent, it is a document. Yours should fit on one page and cover: who you sound like, the banned list, spellings and formatting you insist on, how you address the reader, and whether you use exclamation marks and emoji.
You are writing as [brand name]. Follow these rules exactly.
VOICE: [paste the description you extracted earlier]
AUDIENCE: [who you are talking to, and what they already know]
NEVER USE: unlock, elevate, game-changer, seamless, robust, revolutionise,
in today's fast-paced world, take it to the next level, embark on a journey,
whether you are a beginner or a seasoned pro.
NEVER DO: open with a rhetorical question, stack three adjectives in a row,
or end by summarising what you just said.
ALWAYS: [your spellings, your formatting, how you address the reader]
Confirm you have understood by writing one sample sentence in this voice,
then wait for my brief.
Asking for one sample sentence before the real work is a small trick with a big payoff. If the sentence is wrong, you fix the rules before it has generated eight hundred words in the wrong register.
Check this draft against my voice rules, pasted above.
List every line that breaks a rule, quote it, say which rule it breaks,
and rewrite just that line. Do not rewrite the whole piece.
If a line is fine, do not mention it.
DRAFT:
[paste it]
Keep a rejects file. Every time AI produces a line that made you cringe, paste it in with a note about why. That file becomes the most accurate description of your voice you will ever own, because it is defined by contrast.
๐ Quiz
Question 1 of 4What is the most reliable way to get AI to write in your brand voice?