Voice Style

Voice & Style

Overview

Record the book's voice and surface conventions in style-sheet.md, then enforce them. The style sheet is the copyeditor's record: dialect and spelling choices, capitalisation, hyphenation, numbers, dialogue punctuation, a one-line voice summary per major speaker, and a watch list. Its frontmatter is machine-readable, and story prose counts violations and prose tics in every chapter. Use this skill so voice stays the same across chapters, drafting sessions, and agents.

Prerequisites

A story project with story.md in the root. story init scaffolds style-sheet.md; older projects can add it with story init '<title>' --dir . --force, which only adds missing files, or by copying references/style-sheet-guide.md's frontmatter block by hand.

Language

Read language in story.md (a BCP 47 tag; a missing field means en). The style sheet records the conventions of that language, and the voice description is written about prose in it. dialect: british and american and the built-in word lists behind filter words, -ly adverbs, and said-bookisms are English. For another language, set dialect: unspecified, record spelling variants as preferred entries, and settle dialogue and punctuation with ../line-editing/references/language-conventions.md. When story prose or story voices reports a check skipped for the book's language, do that pass by reading (see references/prose-checks.md, Other languages).

When to Use

• Starting a project, once the first chapter or a writing sample exists
• Before drafting when voice has drifted between chapters or sessions
• When a copyedit pass needs a style decision recorded (the copyedit itself belongs to the line-editing skill, which reads this file)
• When the user wants a mechanical prose check before sharing a draft
• Recording each character's voice (the style sheet's Character Voices line, voice-words, voice-avoid) and checking it with story voices
• NOT for character personality or arc (use character-management)
• NOT for scene-level craft such as deep POV or subtext (use scene-craft)
• NOT for the line-by-line prose pass itself (line edit, copyedit, read-aloud, proof): use the line-editing skill, which reads this style sheet and runs these checks
• NOT for rewriting dialogue so the voices sound distinct when everyone sounds the same: use the line-editing skill's voice differentiation pass, which follows the voices recorded here

Workflow

1. Build or update the style sheet

1. Read story.md (genre, POV, tense, Tone & Style), style-sheet.md, and two or three drafted chapters or a sample the user supplies. If there is no prose yet, ask the user for a paragraph that sounds right or three published books whose voice is close.
2. Fill the sections in style-sheet.md following references/style-sheet-guide.md. Record decisions the prose already makes; do not invent new ones silently. When the draft is inconsistent (both grey and gray), ask the user which form wins.
3. Set the frontmatter:
   • dialect: british | american | unspecified (unspecified for a book not in English)
   • one preferred entry per variant: use is the house form, avoid the form to flag. Repeat entries for several variants of one word.
   • watch-words: words or phrases this book overuses
   • allow-words: built-in filter words, adverbs, or dialect spellings this book uses on purpose (a proper noun like Harbor Street in a British book)
   • samples: files or folders of the author's own prose that sound right, relative to the project folder: an earlier book (../book-one) or chapters the author has approved, each file named on its own (chapters/chapter-01.md, never chapters/, which warns style-sample-own-chapters). A listed chapter is the measure, so story prose does not compare it. Ask the user which; never list prose the agent drafted and the author has not approved, or the profile measures the agent's voice. With at least 2,000 words of narration, story prose compares each chapter with the samples instead of fixed limits
4. Character Voices entries summarise each character file's Voice & Speech Patterns section in one line and link to it. Record words a speaker reaches for in the character file's voice-words list and words they would never say in voice-avoid, so story voices can check them. The character file is canon; if the two disagree, fix the style sheet, or ask the user before changing the character.

2. Draft and revise against it

• chapter-writing and discovery-drafting read style-sheet.md before drafting. Write in the recorded voice, use the house spellings, and give each speaker the recorded patterns.
• When a new convention appears mid-draft (a new invented term, a number style), add it to the style sheet in the same change.

3. Run the prose check

story prose .

The report lists, per chapter: sentence count, average and longest length, and spread; filter words and -ly adverbs per 1,000 narration words (dialogue is excluded); plain and said-bookism dialogue tags; words echoed within 30 words; watch-word counts; and avoided spellings. Across the manuscript it lists repeated 4-word phrases and character first names that readers could confuse. Warnings are advisory. The command exits 0 unless a file cannot be read, a story.md severity entry promotes a warning to an error, or the command line is wrong, such as --baseline with no samples (exit 2). See references/prose-checks.md for what each count means and how to respond.

When the style sheet lists samples, the report opens with a profile of the author's own prose, and chapters that drift from it warn (prose-baseline-sentences, -paragraphs, -dialogue, -filter-words, -adverbs) in place of the fixed filter-word and adverb limits. Treat a drift as a prompt to reread the chapter, not a rule. Tell the user where it drifts and ask whether it is deliberate: a fight scene runs short, a quiet chapter long. Never rewrite a chapter just to move a number back inside its tolerance.

To lint a passage that is not in a chapter file yet (a draft scene, a proposed rewrite), pipe it in with - in place of the path: story prose - < draft-scene.md. Run it from the project folder, or add --path <project>, so the style sheet applies. story voices - does the same for dialogue.