Creating Your Style Guide From These Methods

Module 7 · Section 3 of 4

Creating Your Style Guide From These Methods

Once you’ve done 2–3 of these exercises, you’ll have raw material scattered across transcripts, recordings, and notes. Now you need to transform those discoveries into something actually usable.

Start with your words.

Begin with the words that showed up repeatedly when you weren’t thinking about them. Not the words you think you should use — the ones that just came out naturally when you were explaining something to a friend or ranting in a voice memo. Those are your distinctive elements. Write them down. They’re the foundation of your voice.

Then look at your rhythm.

Look at how your sentences actually move. When you were speaking freely or typing without editing, what happened? Did you use short punchy sentences? Long meandering ones that took their time getting to the point? Both? That rhythm matters more than you think. Document it. Note your average length, your variation patterns, whether you use fragments for emphasis or avoid them entirely. This becomes your rhythm and pacing guide.

Then capture your transitions.

Pay attention to how you moved between ideas. In those voice memos or text messages, what words did you actually use? “So,” “But here’s the thing,” “Anyway,” “Look,” “The reality is”? Whatever they are, they’re your natural transitions. They’re how your brain connects thoughts. Write them down. They’re part of your voice, not filler to be removed.

Then decide about humour.

If humour showed up naturally in your exercises, document what kind. Sarcastic? Absurdist? Deadpan? Self-deprecating? Or did you avoid it entirely? There’s no wrong answer here, but it affects everything else you write. Knowing whether you use humor — and what kind — helps you stay consistent.

Finally, map your analogies.

Notice where your analogies came from. When you explained something complex, what domains did you pull from? Sports? Cooking? Tech? Nature? Your brain has patterns for how it makes sense of things. Those patterns reveal themselves in your metaphors. Document them. They’re shortcuts to explaining ideas in a way that feels like you.

---

All of this documentation feeds into the same style guide structure from Part 3, Step 3. You’re just gathering the raw material through a different process — one that might work better for your brain than analyzing finished writing samples.

The goal is the same: a documented understanding of what your voice sounds like so you can teach AI to maintain it.