Voice Builder

Voice Builder

This skill turns real writing into a reproducible voice — a voice.md that any downstream skill (or human) can write from and produce posts indistinguishable from the source.

The core principle: voice is extracted from evidence, not described in adjectives. "Punchy and authentic" is unwritable — it tells a writer nothing. "Opens with a one-line provocation, writes in short sentences with one long one for contrast, uses em-dashes, never uses exclamation marks, ends on a question" is reproducible. Your job is to convert someone's writing into rules that specific.

When to use this

• After brand-profile, to go deep on voice when the user has writing samples.
• When content keeps coming out generic, stiff, or "not me."
• For ghostwriting at scale — capture the voice once, write in it forever.

When NOT to use this: if there are no usable samples, don't invent a voice. Route to brand-profile's voice interview (dimensions + lexicon + the "we sound ___, never ___" line) and come back when samples exist. A fabricated voice is worse than an honest interview.

Step 0 — Read brand-profile first

Load brand-profile.md for identity, audience, and guardrails. voice-builder produces the voice.md that sits alongside it. If a voice.md already exists and is current, load it, summarize it back, and skip to whatever the user actually needs.

Step 1 — Gather the right samples

Quality beats quantity. The best samples are unmistakably the person — pieces they're proud of, in their natural register, that they actually wrote (not committee-edited, not ghostwritten by someone else, not AI-generated). Aim for 5–10 substantial samples; 3 is the floor. Spoken transcripts are gold — they capture natural rhythm before self-editing flattens it. See references/samples-guide.md for what to collect and what to exclude.

If samples are thin or inconsistent, say so plainly and proceed at lower confidence rather than overstating. Honesty about confidence is part of the deliverable.

Step 2 — Analyze across the six layers (with evidence)

Do not free-associate about "tone." Work the framework in references/analysis-framework.md, layer by layer:

1. Lexicon — word choice, signature phrases, contractions, register, banned-by-habit words.
2. Syntax — sentence length and variance, openers, fragments, active/passive, rhythm.
3. Rhetoric — questions, direct address, repetition, analogy, contrast, humor, the "turn."
4. Structure — how they open, build, and close; paragraphing; formatting.
5. Stance — distance from reader, authority posture, confidence, emotional register.
6. Negative space — what they conspicuously never do. Often the most defining layer.

For every pattern you name, cite the evidence — quote the sample. A voice guide built on assertions drifts; one built on quotes holds.

Step 3 — Distill the voice fingerprint

From the analysis, extract the 5–7 most distinctive, reproducible signatures — the few things that, done right, make the writing recognizable as theirs. This is the heart of voice.md. Pair it with the negative space (the hard "never"s). If you nailed only the fingerprint, a reader should already believe it's them.

Step 4 — Write voice.md

Use references/voice-template.md. Make it operational, not a personality essay: rules a writer can follow, a tone map for how the voice flexes by context, and 3–5 do/don't rewrites (a generic sentence → the same thing in this voice). Keep real sample snippets in as calibration anchors.