Build a Voice Guide From Published Work

Voice guides are usually a list of adjectives - clear, confident, human, approachable - which every writer already believes describes them, so no draft changes. The useful artefact is descriptive rather than aspirational: it names the patterns in the pages you already consider good and shows the rejected alternative beside each one. Build it once you have enough published work to sample from, and rebuild it when the people doing the writing turn over.

The skill file

---
name: voice-guide-from-published-work
description: Use when several writers are producing pages that each read differently and nobody can state concretely what the house voice is.
---

# Build a Voice Guide From Published Work

Voice guides are usually a list of adjectives - clear, confident, human, approachable - which every writer already believes describes them, so no draft changes. The useful artefact is descriptive rather than aspirational: it names the patterns in the pages you already consider good and shows the rejected alternative beside each one. Build it once you have enough published work to sample from, and rebuild it when the people doing the writing turn over.

## What you need first

- ten to fifteen published pages the team agrees are good, picked before any analysis
- three or four pages the team considers off-voice, which are what make the rules legible
- the actual editing notes from recent review rounds, which usually contain the rules already
- a decision on who holds final say on voice, or the guide gets argued with instead of used

## Method

1. Collect the good and the bad samples first and do not justify the choices yet. Choosing by feel and then finding the pattern is more honest than deciding a pattern and hunting for evidence of it.
2. Read the openings of all the samples side by side. Openings carry most of the perceived voice, and the difference between the two piles is usually visible within two sentences.
3. Extract mechanical facts rather than impressions: typical sentence length, whether you address the reader as you, whether contractions appear, whether headings are questions or noun phrases. These are checkable by a writer at midnight; "confident" is not.
4. Mine the last few rounds of editing notes for repeated corrections. Any note an editor has written three times is already a rule and belongs in the guide.
5. Write each rule as a pair: one sentence from a real published page, and the version you rejected. Paired examples change drafts, adjectives do not.
6. Cap the guide at two pages and put the three most broken rules at the top. A long guide is read once during onboarding and never opened again.
7. Add a short banned list of constructions you will always cut, so writers stop producing them rather than editors removing them every time.

## What this produces

A two-page descriptive voice guide with mechanical rules, paired before-and-after examples and a banned-construction list.

## Where this goes wrong

- Writing the guide from how you wish you sounded rather than from pages you actually published, producing a document no draft ever matches
- Filling it with format rules such as heading levels and image sizes, which buries the writing guidance readers came for
- Freezing it, so it enforces the habits of writers who left and obstructs the ones who arrived

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/voice-guide-from-published-work

What you need first

• ten to fifteen published pages the team agrees are good, picked before any analysis
• three or four pages the team considers off-voice, which are what make the rules legible
• the actual editing notes from recent review rounds, which usually contain the rules already
• a decision on who holds final say on voice, or the guide gets argued with instead of used

Method

1. 01 Collect the good and the bad samples first and do not justify the choices yet. Choosing by feel and then finding the pattern is more honest than deciding a pattern and hunting for evidence of it.
2. 02 Read the openings of all the samples side by side. Openings carry most of the perceived voice, and the difference between the two piles is usually visible within two sentences.
3. 03 Extract mechanical facts rather than impressions: typical sentence length, whether you address the reader as you, whether contractions appear, whether headings are questions or noun phrases. These are checkable by a writer at midnight; "confident" is not.
4. 04 Mine the last few rounds of editing notes for repeated corrections. Any note an editor has written three times is already a rule and belongs in the guide.
5. 05 Write each rule as a pair: one sentence from a real published page, and the version you rejected. Paired examples change drafts, adjectives do not.
6. 06 Cap the guide at two pages and put the three most broken rules at the top. A long guide is read once during onboarding and never opened again.
7. 07 Add a short banned list of constructions you will always cut, so writers stop producing them rather than editors removing them every time.

What this produces

A two-page descriptive voice guide with mechanical rules, paired before-and-after examples and a banned-construction list.

Where this goes wrong

• Writing the guide from how you wish you sounded rather than from pages you actually published, producing a document no draft ever matches
• Filling it with format rules such as heading levels and image sizes, which buries the writing guidance readers came for
• Freezing it, so it enforces the habits of writers who left and obstructs the ones who arrived

Use this skill in your own AI

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