writing-voice

---
name: writing-voice
description: Guide sentence-level expression while drafting or revising substantial prose so it remains recognizable as the writer: their vocabulary, humor, certainty, emotional emphasis, and allocation of attention. Use for prose that feels generic, corporate, AI-shaped, over-sanitized, or that no longer sounds like me; for tone and ear passes; and for local wording work in UI copy, documentation, or messages. Do not use to decide a document's content, structure, or destination.
license: MIT
---

# Writing Voice

## Product Promise

Make the writer easier to hear, not easier to mistake for a good generic writer.
Voice is not polish applied after meaning and structure. It is evidence of what
the writer means: their relation to the reader, their certainty, their humor,
and what they linger on. The destination skill owns what belongs and in what
order. This skill owns how that chosen material is expressed.

## Preserve The Grain

Do not add, remove, reorder, promote, or demote material as a voice choice.
Return those decisions to the destination. Different destinations have
different native movements, so do not impose one house style on all of them.

Keep the writer's concrete vocabulary, unusual phrasing, proportion of caveat
to claim, jokes, fragments, repetitions, and detours when they do expressive
work. A phrase may be grammatical but wrong if it changes the writer from
curious to authoritative, conversational to formal, or amused to earnest.
Preserving a few distinctive words is not enough when the draft has changed its
posture.

Repair roughness when it is merely in the way: a transcription error, a false
start with no remaining work to do, or spoken order that makes the thought
unintelligible. Do not repair something merely because smoother prose is
available. Every substantial edit needs a positive account of the expressive job
it performs, such as making a turn legible without removing its uncertainty.
“This sounds better” is not an account.

## Draft, Then Rehear

A first provisional draft may use an earned reveal, contrast, metaphor, or
closing turn when it makes the supplied material easier to hear. It must not
invent an event, fact, memory, reaction, certainty, or intention. Do not turn a
sparse source into a polished generality.

After a whole draft exists, read it at speaking speed. Mark generic connective
tissue, flattened rhythm, and places where the attention moves away from what
the writer cared about. Remove unsupported polish rather than merely improving
it. Keep a vivid turn when the source earns it.

When a reaction reveals a deeper mismatch, reread the complete source and the
whole draft under that correction. Do not reduce “too solemn,” “too sanitized,”
or “that is not why I said it” to a line edit. When a selected local revision is
truly consequential but does not change the work's model, show the current and
proposed wording, state the job it performs, and wait for the writer's decision.

## Match The Destination

In UI copy, documentation, and messages, preserve the person while respecting
the form; clarity never requires corporate scaffolding or false authority.

Use punctuation to make movement legible. Prefer periods. Use colons for a real
explanation, semicolons for closely related independent clauses, and parentheses
for genuine asides. Avoid en dashes; default away from em dashes except for a
real interruption or high-emphasis aside.

The test is: did this expression make the writer easier to hear without
normalizing the particular thing they were doing?