Building Your Voice Profile
This is a member-only chapter. Log in with your Signal Over Noise membership email to continue.
Log in to readModule 3 · Section 3 of 7
Building Your Voice Profile
You cannot write a good VOICE.md from memory. You have to build it from your actual published writing.
The process I used:
Step 1: Gather a sample set. Pull ten to fifteen pieces of your best work — the issues that got the most replies, the posts you still think are good when you reread them. If you’re starting a new newsletter and don’t have much yet, use anything you’ve written: emails, Slack messages, LinkedIn posts. Voice is consistent across formats.
Step 2: Run the voice-analyzer. This is a Claude Code skill that reads a set of files and extracts voice patterns: characteristic sentence lengths, opening constructions, transition phrases, vocabulary preferences, what you do when making a strong point versus hedging. It doesn’t tell you what your voice should be — it tells you what your voice actually is.
# In Claude Code
/voice-analyzer --files "path/to/sample/*.md"The output is a draft VOICE.md you then edit. The analyser gets most of the patterns right but misses nuance — you’ll remove some things it includes (patterns that are in your writing but aren’t intentional or good) and add things it misses (distinctive choices you make that don’t appear in the sample frequently enough to register).
Step 3: Refine with examples. Pull two or three paragraphs from your sample set that represent your voice best and add them directly to the VOICE.md as positive examples. These are not paraphrased or summarised — they’re verbatim. The agent reads them and uses them as anchors.
Step 4: Add the banned phrases. Review your samples for what’s notably absent — phrases you’ve never used, constructions you actively dislike. Add them to the banned list. Start small; you can always add more.
Step 5: Test it. Give the newsletter-writer agent a brief and your VOICE.md and ask it to draft a section. Read the output. Does it sound like you? If not, where specifically does it diverge? Adjust the relevant section of VOICE.md and test again. Two or three rounds is usually enough to get a profile that produces usable drafts.