For months every draft Claude gave me came back generic. I'd type "make this sound like me, warm but professional," and I'd get back something polished and empty that any woman on LinkedIn could have posted. It didn't sound like anyone at all.
Here's what actually got it to sound like me.
1. Stop describing your voice
"Warm but professional" means something to a person who already knows what I sound like. But it means nothing to a machine that's never heard me talk. You can't describe a voice into existence, so you have to show it one.
2. Feed it 10 things you already wrote
Use your normal work over your best work, meaning the stuff that never makes it to LinkedIn, like a long email to a friend at 11pm or a caption I wrote half asleep with a baby on me. The mess is where your voice actually lives.
3. Ask for mechanics instead of adjectives
I banned adjectives outright, so no "warm" and no "authentic." What I wanted was how long my sentences run, which words I start them with too often and where I put the joke.
4. Make it quote you back to yourself
I wanted real lines pulled straight from what I'd pasted in. If it can't point at an actual sentence you wrote, it's guessing, and a voice profile that's guessing is just a horoscope with better formatting.
5. Build a banned list
This one did more than the rest combined, and it took 2 minutes. I listed the specific words that actually make me wince (honestly, quietly, delve, leverage as a verb, the rule of three), plus a rule against em dashes. I also banned listing what something isn't before landing on what it is, which is a trope I didn't know I hated until I saw it written out and felt my entire body reject it.
6. Give it a humanizer
This is a standing set of rules that runs on everything now without me asking. It cuts the tidy summary at the end (I never summarize, I just stop), varies the sentence length, gets specific instead of vague and uses contractions like an actual person.
7. Fix the profile instead of the draft
When something comes back wrong, don't just edit the sentence in front of you and move on. Go add a line to the profile that says "I never do that." Mine has grown a line at a time for 6 months, and every line in it exists because something annoyed me once.
All 7 live in one file now, and I hand it to Claude at the start of anything I write, including this. It learns once, quoting real lines back at me until I believe it, and after that it just writes.