How to Capture Your Brand Voice for Human and AI Writers

How to make sure your content reflects your brand's voice.

The short answer is to get your voice down in writing before anyone else (or any AI) starts writing as you, by looking at your best writing, listening to how you talk, and noting the small details like your punctuation and the words you'd never use, then turning all of that into a guide you can hand over.

From there, it helps to be clear with whoever is writing for you about how you feel about AI, and to review the first drafts together. That's it in a nutshell, and the sections below go through each part in more detail, including the tells that make writing sound like AI and how to decide which ones to keep.

Where do you start with your own voice?

Start with your own writing… Pull together your best non-AI written content, and it has to be something you wrote yourself, because a piece that's been through an AI first will only show you what the AI sounds like. When you’ve done that, if you're happy with how it reads, you can pull out the patterns:

how long your sentences tend to be,

the tone,

the phrases you keep coming back to,

and how you use punctuation (including whether you use those em dashes!).

The small details are important, like whether you use quote marks or apostrophes, (for example I always use single ‘quotes’ and rarely “double”. Its the little details that layer up and build a picture of your writing style.

If you're not happy with your own writing, and that's the reason you'd like help, you can still pull out your tone of voice from what you have. It then helps to find writing that would be ideal for you, so that you and your writer have something to aim for- but that initial look at your writing is your start point.

What if you don't have much writing to look at?

Don’t forget your voice also lives in how you talk, so recorded conversations are a great source. Sessions with a strategist, voice notes and client calls (with explicit permission from anyone else on the recording) or just rambling Granola notes when you’re out walking… all show your sentence length and the phrases you use without thinking. AI can help here too, because you can ask it to interview you, or give it transcripts and ask it to analyse your tone from those conversations. If you have permission from clients to use the transcripts, it can also pull out frequently asked questions, objections, pain points and positive feedback, along with the phrasing and messaging you use, and all of that will help your writing whether you end up using AI or writing the post yourself.

If you don't have either, a questionnaire is a good place to begin, and you can have a go at a rough version yourself... start with a row of sliding scales, with pairs like informal and formal, approachable and authoritative, fun and serious, or bold and understated, place yourself somewhere along each one, and jot down a phrase or 2 you'd actually say that fits where you've put yourself, because the phrase shows a writer what that spot sounds like out loud. Then pick a handful of words from a list of character traits that feel like you, plus a few you'd never want to sound like, and ask someone who hears you talk every day where they'd put you (a second view usually adds detail you'd miss on your own, and it's what I do with clients in a more structured way as part of the brand insights pack I mention at the end of this post).

What should you ask yourself about your voice?

The interviews and strategy sessions I do with new clients bring out the rest of it, and you can consider these yourself when you work on your tone of voice. Consider banned words, and whether you address people as a group or as individuals (I'd always lean towards individuals, since you're talking to 1 person at a time, but note down your approach). Then tie it back to your audience, by asking what words they'd use and what phrases they might type into a search, which is where your voice starts to link up with SEO. Of course, your writing needs to sound like you, but where writing that sounds like you and uses the phrases your audience are looking for is doing 2 jobs at once, which is always a win!

One more question is worth asking too: what makes something feel like AI to you? Your answer gives a writer a concrete list to work from, or helps you create your own boundaries, similar to your banned words list.

How specific can a voice guide get?

Very specific, and that's what makes it useful. Mine says single ‘quotes’ always and never “double” ones, a hyphen straight after the word with no space before it and no em dashes anywhere, contractions every time (there's, it's, could've), long layered sentences with ellipses for the natural pauses, British English throughout, a small set of emojis I generally use and one I never do, and a list of words I avoid, like 'elevate', 'landscape' and 'quietly' when it's used as a metaphor.

None of it would suit everyone, and it doesn't need to, because a guide this detailed means anyone writing as me (a person or an AI) has a lot less to guess at. It's also a good exercise to try on your own writing, since you'll probably find you have a few rules you follow without ever having written them down.

Should you remove the AI tells?

The em dash, 'quietly', 'landed' and 'elevate' are all seen as AI tells now, so they're often the first things removed when copy gets a human edit. I think it's well worth deciding for yourself whether they've always been part of your language. If you've always written with em dashes, I'd say keep using them, and I worked with a client who has always written that way, so we used them for her because that's how she writes. AI was trained on us humans after all!

But it's an active choice either way, so you remove the tells that were never in your natural speech/writing, and keep the ones that always were. As an example, when I'm speaking to camera I say 'honestly' all the time, and in writing it's seen as an AI tell, so I use it much less in copy now (that's a choice I've had to make, and you'll have to make yours too!).

What if someone else is writing as you?

When someone starts writing as you, there's usually an adjustment period, and it's very normal to have notes at the start, especially when it's a founder and the writing is in their voice as an individual. However much analysis goes into a voice, it takes a little while for writer and client to settle in together, and the notes get fewer as the writer gets the hang of it. Imagine it as getting to know a good friend… after a while you mirror speech/words, have shared reference points etc. The same will be true of working with a writer too. Company voices tend to need fewer notes, because they're less personal- but the background work still needs to be done so your writer or AI can get as close to it as it can.

It's also worth telling whoever writes for you how you feel about AI, since providers work in very different ways. Some are fully AI with a human edit, some are entirely human-written, and some are a hybrid, so if you want no AI from start to finish, ask for that and expect them to be honest about their process. If you're happy with it, say so too, because you might be talking to a human-led provider and you'd want to spot that mismatch early. I've written more about that question in my post on what to look for in a content strategy consultant https://www.sheldon.social/post/What-to-look-for-in-a-content-strategy-consultant.

What should you hand over once you have your voice?

Once you have all of this, it helps to put it in a form you can give to a writing team or to your AI, so they can write more accurately. That usually means a tone of voice and language guide, and together with all your other brand insight assets like empathy mapping and a messaging guide, they will have everything they need to be able to write like you.

I'm putting together an offer where we work through the brand analysis together and you finish with

-Tone of voice and language guide

-Messaging framework

-Ideal client profile

-Brand story, positioning, proof, promise, and your one thing

-Authority topics and content pillars

If that sounds like it would be helpful, get in touch to learn more.