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Claude For Writing In Your Own Voice
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
The usual approach to getting Claude to sound like you is a paragraph of
adjectives — "write in a warm but professional tone, not too formal, a bit
direct." Adjectives are a description of a voice, not the voice itself, and
the output that comes back reads like a plausible average of what those
words usually mean to people — competent, and recognisably not you.
The rule: real writing samples teach voice far better than instructions
describing it — show, don't tell, applies to prompting exactly as it does to
writing.
The mechanism: building a voice sample
- Collect three to five short pieces you actually wrote and are happy
with. Emails, posts, a bio, whatever you have — real finished writing,
not notes or drafts you abandoned partway through.
- Paste them in before you ask for anything, labelled plainly as
examples of your voice. Not "here's my tone" followed by adjectives —
the actual text.
- Ask it to describe the voice back to you first. Before using it to
write anything, have it name the patterns it's noticing — sentence
length, where you use humour, how you open and close, what you never do.
If the description sounds wrong, correct it before moving on; it's much
cheaper to fix the description than to fix ten drafts written from a
wrong one.
- Then ask for new writing "in this voice," referring back to the
samples and the confirmed description together. The combination does
more work than either alone.
- Correct specifically when it drifts. Not "that doesn't sound like
me" — "I'd never end a paragraph with a question like that" is a
correction it can actually use next time.
What to skip
Skip this entirely for genuinely voice-neutral writing — a technical
summary, a set of instructions, anything where "your voice" isn't actually
the point. And skip trying to build the sample set from writing you didn't
actually write yourself (something already heavily edited by someone else,
or previous AI-assisted drafts) — you'll just be teaching it to imitate an
imitation.
Guardrails
- A convincing imitation of your voice is still not your judgement — review
anything voice-matched for content and accuracy exactly as carefully as
you would anything else, the tone match doesn't vouch for the substance.
- If you're writing on behalf of an organisation with an actual house style
guide, that document should sit alongside your personal samples, not be
replaced by them.
- Be straightforward with readers about how something was produced where
that matters — a convincing voice match doesn't change what disclosure you
owe your audience.
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