How You Sound

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Module 5: How You Sound

If you create content — newsletters, blog posts, social media, client deliverables — this module is not optional.

Everything before this has been about how Claude works. This is about how it sounds.

Why “Friendly Tone” Fails

“Write in a friendly tone” is the most common voice instruction, and it’s nearly useless.

Friendly is a category, not a specification. Claude’s default friendly is different from your friendly. Its friendly is confident, slightly formal, and optimised for universal acceptability — which is exactly what your writing isn’t, if it’s any good.

Your voice is specific. It has patterns — sentence structures you reach for, words you prefer, words you never use. A particular relationship to punctuation. A rhythm that’s yours.

“Friendly tone” doesn’t capture any of that. A voice file does.

The Five Dimensions

A useful voice profile captures five things:

Sentence structure — do you use long flowing sentences or short punches? Both, in a particular sequence? Knowing your sentence structure patterns tells Claude how to pace your prose, not just what words to use.

Metaphor source — where do your analogies come from? Sports? Movies? Physical space? Food? Architecture? Writers draw from the same well repeatedly. Identifying your well lets Claude draw from it instead of reaching for generic comparisons.

Qualifiers — how do you hedge? “In my experience” vs “I think” vs “it seems to me” vs “so far” — these aren’t interchangeable. Your hedging patterns are part of your credibility signal. Wrong qualifiers break voice even when the rest is right.

Rhythmic patterns — em-dashes? Parenthetical asides? One-word paragraphs for emphasis? Lists vs prose? These are fingerprints. The way you use structural devices is as distinctive as word choice.

What you avoid — business jargon? Exclamation marks? Emojis? Certain phrases? The avoidance list is often more useful than the preference list, because defaults lean toward the things you’d cut.

How to Build Your Voice File

The best method: collect five pieces of writing you’re proud of. Not the most polished — the most you. Read them back-to-back, looking for patterns rather than content.

What keeps showing up? A particular transition phrase? A tendency to open paragraphs with short declarative sentences? Commas in unusual places? A preference for concrete over abstract? That’s your voice.

Write down what you notice. That’s the start of your VOICE.md.

Then reference it from your CLAUDE.md:

## Voice

When writing as me or for my publications, follow the voice profile
in VOICE.md. Match the patterns, not just the "tone."

The last line matters — “patterns, not just tone” — because tone is what most people specify and patterns are what actually determine whether something sounds like you.

What Changes When This Works

When Claude has a real voice profile, something shifts. The output stops requiring heavy editing. You’re not fixing word choices and breaking up sentences — you’re reviewing content, which is a different and much faster job.

The gap between what Claude produces and what you’d have written closes. Not to zero. But close enough that the output becomes a strong first draft rather than raw material.

This afternoon: Find three pieces of your own writing. Read them back-to-back. Write down five patterns you notice. That’s the start of your VOICE.md.