GUIDE
How to write down a voice.
Every brand has a voice. Almost none of them can write it down. I’ve been handed style guides that said “bold but approachable” and nothing else, then been expected to produce copy that matched whoever wrote it last. Twelve years of that taught me the guide was never the problem.
A guide describes a feeling. What a writer needs at the keyboard is a specification.
Below: four parameters you can observe, measure, and hand to someone else.
The four parameters
A brand voice is not a mood. It is a set of decisions a writer makes repeatedly, often without noticing. Those decisions cluster into four groups.
A — Architecture: how the sentences are built
Sentence length, clause structure, how paragraphs open and close. One brand stacks short declaratives; another builds long subordinated sentences that land on a single clause. Architecture is the skeleton, and it survives every topic.
T — Tone: the emotional register
Where the writing sits between clinical and warm, ironic and earnest, confident and cautious. Tone is set by word choice and stance, not by adjectives in a style guide. “We think” and “We know” are two different brands.
C — Cadence: the rhythm and pacing
How the prose moves when read aloud. Where it pauses, where it accelerates, whether it uses fragments for emphasis. Cadence is why two pieces with identical vocabulary can feel nothing alike.
G — Guardrails: the words the brand would never use
The negative space. The words, constructions, and habits the brand avoids: hedging, exclamation points, passive voice, jargon, superlatives. Guardrails are the fastest way to tell whether a draft is in-voice, because violations are easier to spot than virtues.
How to document a brand voice
Step 1
Collect the brand at its most itself
Pull running prose: about pages, founder letters, launch announcements, newsletters. Skip spec sheets, legal boilerplate, and anything that’s mostly bullets. Two or three strong samples beat ten weak ones.
Step 2
Read for structure before word choice
Count sentence lengths. Watch how paragraphs open and where they end. Note what the first sentence of a section does. Structure is the layer most guides skip, and it’s the layer readers feel first.
Step 3
Name the register in observable terms
Replace adjectives like “friendly” with behaviors: uses contractions, addresses the reader directly, admits uncertainty. If a writer can’t test a sentence against the rule, the rule isn’t specific enough.
Step 4
Write the guardrails as a refusal list
List what the brand never does, with real examples from outside the brand’s copy. A refusal list is shorter to write than a style guide and catches more errors in review.
Why most voice guides fail
They describe the voice instead of specifying it. I’ve sat in kickoffs where “confident, human, and a little playful” was the entire brief, then watched three writers produce three unrelated drafts and every one of them get notes.
A usable voice profile answers questions you can test a sentence against. How long are the sentences? Does the brand hedge? Which words are banned? The difference between a mood board and a specification is whether a second writer can reproduce the output.
The shortcut
Documenting a voice by hand takes hours of close reading, and I was doing it across four accounts at once. So I built the thing that does the reading.
Paste a brand’s published prose into SIC Sequencer and it reports the four parameters above as a reusable profile, a Brand Strand, ready to apply to any draft. First one’s free and you don’t need an account to try it.