AI Guides › Claude Mastery
Claude's Tone Settings: Making It Sound Like You, Not Like A Brochure
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
The default complaint about AI writing is that it "sounds like AI" — a bit
brochure-y, a bit over-enthusiastic, full of the same handful of sentence
shapes. Most people respond by adding more adjectives to their instructions:
"write more casually," "sound more human." That almost never works, because
adjectives describe a feeling, not a method.
The rule: show it real examples of your own writing before you describe
your tone — examples are instructions a description can't be.
The mechanism
- Paste in something you actually wrote — an email, a Slack message, a
past piece of work — and say plainly: "match this voice."
- Name the specific things you want kept, not just the vibe. Short
sentences? Contractions? No exclamation marks? "Sound human" is vague;
"no exclamation marks and no em-dash asides" is an instruction it can
follow.
- Give it one thing you dislike as clearly as one thing you like.
"Never use the phrase 'in today's fast-paced world'" does more work than
ten sentences of positive description.
- Ask it to read its own draft back and flag anything that sounds
generic, before you do. This catches the brochure-ish sentences it
otherwise slides past.
- Save the working version as a reusable style note, once you're happy
with it, rather than re-deriving it from scratch next time.
What to skip
Skip long abstract tone descriptions ("professional but approachable, warm
but authoritative") — they read like a brand deck and produce exactly the
generic middle-ground voice you were trying to avoid. And skip re-explaining
your tone every single session once you've saved it once; that's what memory
and a saved style note are for.
Guardrails
- A matched tone is not the same as a correct answer. Review the substance
separately from the voice — a well-disguised wrong answer is still wrong.
- If you're writing on behalf of someone else (a client, an employer), match
their voice from their material, not your own — and say so explicitly, so
it doesn't default to a generic professional register instead.
- Tone-matching works best with real samples of the actual context (a work
email needs work-email samples, not personal texts) — mixing registers
produces an odd blend, not a flexible voice.
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