Why "write in my voice" never works
The instruction sounds complete to you because you already know what you sound like. The model does not.
When you type "write in my voice", you are asking the model to guess. It has never read your work, so it fills the gap with the most average writing it has seen.
What it needs is evidence: your audience, your writing, your preferences and the checks you already apply before publishing. Those four things are the profile. Building it takes about half an hour, once.
One honest limit: a profile improves what the model works from. It does not guarantee a perfect impression of you, and it will not make a draft true. You still own the facts and the final edit.
Gather your four inputs
Work through these in order.
Name the one person you are writing for
5 minutesWrite down who reads this, what they already know and the single action or realisation you want from them.
Why this matters
Avoid "business owners" or "professionals". Those are categories, not readers. Write something closer to "an owner of a six-person plumbing firm who already uses a CRM and is sceptical that AI applies to them".
Choose three to five pieces you wrote
10 minutesPick work you own and have permission to reuse. Read each one aloud and keep only the pieces that still sound like you.
Why this matters
A real paragraph shows choices a label cannot. Two people who both call their tone professional and warm write nothing alike.
Careful. Only use writing you own or have permission to reuse. Do not paste a client's material, a colleague's work or a writer you admire into a profile you will reuse.
Record how you actually sound
10 minutesNote your usual formality, typical sentence length, spelling choice, useful quirks and the words you naturally avoid.
Why this matters
Be concrete and mechanical. "UK English", "short sentences, rarely over twenty words" and "never uses the word leverage" are all instructions a model can follow.
Write down the checks you already apply
5 minutesList the facts that must survive editing, the claims that need a source and the signals that tell you a draft has gone vague.
Why this matters
Written down, the model applies them before you read the draft, so your attention goes on judgement rather than on catching the same three problems again.
Fill in your voice profile
Copy this into a note you keep. You are completing it, not sending it. Every bracket you leave unfilled is a gap the model will fill for you.
Reader-completed voice profile template
VOICE PROFILE
Who I am writing for:
[Audience, context and what they already know]
What this piece needs to achieve:
[One concrete reader action or understanding]
My source material:
[Three to five links or pasted samples I own and may reuse]
How I normally sound:
[Level of formality, typical sentence length, spelling choice and useful quirks]
Words, claims and habits to avoid:
[Buzzwords, clichés, tone mismatches and unsupported guarantees]
Details the draft must preserve:
[Names, figures, product terms and factual boundaries]
Quality checks:
[Questions I will use to judge specificity, evidence and audience fit]Your examples do the most useful work.
Set up the drafting task
Open the assistant you already use, paste your completed profile, then paste this underneath it. It tells the model how to treat the profile and what to hand back.
Reusable setup prompt
Use the voice profile and source material I provide as a working brief for this draft.
Preserve all supplied facts, names, figures and product terms. Do not invent proof, results, quotations or personal experience. If evidence or context is missing, ask a direct question before drafting.
Match the audience, purpose, language preferences and quality checks in the profile. Use my examples to understand specific writing choices, not to copy sentences without permission.
Return one draft. After it, list any factual claim or assumption I should verify. Do not claim certainty about how closely the draft matches me.Run the revision loop
The first draft is raw material. These four moves turn it into something you would put your name on.
Mark where the draft misses, line by line
Go through and mark each place the draft misses the audience, the purpose or your language preferences. Hand the model the marked lines.
Why this matters
Never say "make it better". The model cannot see what you dislike, so it rewrites at random and often loses the parts you were happy with.
Swap every abstraction for something you own
Replace broad claims with real names, actions, constraints or examples from your source material. Delete anything you cannot support.
Why this matters
"We improve efficiency" could belong to any business. "We remove the weekly spreadsheet hand-off between your sales and delivery teams" could only belong to yours.
Ask for one controlled revision
State the exact changes you want and tell the model to leave everything else alone. Compare the result line by line before accepting it.
Why this matters
Without that instruction, models tend to rewrite the whole piece and quietly undo edits you had already approved.
Feed repeat corrections back into the profile
When you correct the same thing three times, it belongs in the profile as a preference or a check.
Why this matters
Only add a rule once you understand why it helps, otherwise you accumulate instructions that fight each other.
A labelled fictional revision
The same paragraph before and after the revision loop. Both examples are invented for this guide.
Generic first draft
Our innovative solution empowers teams to work more efficiently and focus on what matters most.
Specific revision
The system copies each approved quote into the project board, assigns the delivery owner and keeps the original client notes attached.
Why it changed. The revision names the actual hand-off and removes claims the fictional business did not support with evidence.
One profile, different jobs
You need one profile, not one per format. How you sound stays the same across a proposal, a post and a follow-up email; what changes is the audience and the action that piece has to produce. Keep the profile as it is and rewrite only those two lines for each new job.
Check the draft before it leaves your desk
- Confirm the audience and intended action still match the brief.
- Replace any sentence that could belong to any person or business with a real, relevant detail.
- Check every name, number, quotation, product term and result against its source.
- Remove certainty, proof or personal experience that you did not supply.
- Confirm the spelling choice and sentence rhythm match your stated preferences.
- Read it aloud once. If you would not say it, rewrite it.
Files in this guide
Yours to keep and edit. No attribution needed.