AI Guides › Claude Mastery

Building A Personal Style Guide Claude Actually Follows

By Nigel Guy · 2 min read

You tell Claude "write in my voice" once, get something close, and then spend every session after that re-explaining the same handful of preferences — shorter sentences, no exclamation marks, stop starting emails with "I hope this finds you well." A verbal instruction lives in one conversation and dies with it. You end up teaching the same lesson forever instead of writing it down once.

The mechanism

1. Write down what you're actually correcting, not what you think good writing is. Go back through recent edits you've made to Claude's drafts and note the pattern — do you keep cutting the opening line, shortening the close, removing hedges? Real corrections beat abstract taste every time.
2. Split it into "always," "never," and "depends." A short guide with three real always-rules beats a long one that lists every stylistic preference you have with equal weight.
3. Give examples, not just adjectives. "Direct, not blunt" means nothing on its own. One sentence you'd keep and one you'd rewrite, side by side, teaches the distinction in a way the adjective can't.
4. Keep it to about half a page. A style guide that reads like a brand manual won't get reread or referenced; a short one you can paste at the top of any new chat will.
5. Reattach it every session, or store it somewhere Claude can be told to check. A style guide's value is in its consistent presence, not its one-time existence — if you have Projects or persistent memory available, put it there so you're not pasting it manually each time.
6. Update it when it's wrong, not when it's imperfect. Revise the guide when Claude's output — following the guide correctly — still isn't what you wanted. That's a gap in the guide, not a failure of the model to read your mind.

What to skip

Skip trying to encode "sound smart" or "sound professional" as rules — those aren't style, they're outcomes, and a guide built from outcomes instead of concrete instructions gives Claude nothing to actually follow. And skip perfecting the guide before using it; a rough version tested against three real drafts teaches you more than a week spent polishing an untested one.

Guardrails

• A style guide shapes tone and structure reliably. It won't reliably override factual instructions or reasoning approach — don't bury a "be careful with numbers" instruction inside a style document and expect it to carry the same weight as an explicit ask each time.
• Review the guide occasionally against what you're actually asking for now — voice preferences drift as the kind of writing you're doing changes, and a stale guide gives confidently wrong instructions.
• This is a preference document, not a legal or brand-compliance one — if your organisation has an actual mandated style guide, that takes precedence, and this is for the personal layer on top of it.

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