The reason your drafts sound like LinkedIn is that you asked for your voice by describing it. "Warm but professional." "Friendly and approachable." Those words mean nothing to a machine, and they mean nothing to a person either, which is why the output reads like it was written by a committee that has never met you.
You can't describe a voice into existence. You have to show it one.
This takes about half an hour once, and then you have something you paste into every project and never think about again.
Step 1. Go get ten things you actually wrote
Not your best work. Your normal work, including the messy bits, because the mess is where your voice lives.
Good places to look: sent emails, especially longer ones to someone you like. Texts and voice notes you've transcribed. Captions. Anything you wrote at eleven at night when you'd stopped performing.
Bad places to look: anything you wrote for a boss, anything a committee touched, and anything you were nervous while writing.
Ten is plenty. Five will do.
Step 2. Have it study them
Paste the samples in, then this:
Here are things I wrote. Study them and write me a voice profile.
Don't tell me I'm warm and authentic. I want mechanics:
- Average sentence length, and how much it varies
- How I start sentences, and which words I start them with too often
- How I join clauses. Commas, periods, "and", something else?
- Words and phrases I use repeatedly
- Words I never use
- How I handle emphasis. Caps, italics, repetition, or something else?
- How I open a piece, and how I close one
- Where I put jokes, and what kind
- What I do when I'm about to say something that could sound arrogant
- My punctuation habits, including the wrong ones
Quote me back to myself with at least eight real examples from these samples.
Then write four rules that would let someone imitate me convincingly.The quoting-back part matters. If it can't point at real lines, it's guessing, and you'll get a horoscope instead of a profile.
Step 3. Add your banned list
This is the highest-leverage part of the page and it takes two minutes.
Write down the words that make you wince. Not general bad-writing words, the specific ones that aren't yours. Then add them to the profile as an absolute rule.
Here's mine, so you can see how specific it should get:
Never use: honestly, quietly, noise, real ones, sitting with, delve,
leverage as a verb, journey, unlock, elevate, seamless, robust.
Never use em dashes. Hyphens with spaces instead.
Never write three things in a list when two will do. No rule of three.
Never do "Not X. Not Y. Just Z."
Never start a sentence with "In today's fast-paced world" or I'll
close the laptop and go to bed.That last line isn't a joke, it's the tone I want the profile written in, and it picks that up too.
Step 4. Test it on something you've already written
Don't test on new work, because you have nothing to compare it to. Take something you wrote a month ago, give it the same brief, and see what comes back.
Read both out loud. Out loud is the test. Your ear catches what your eye forgives, and you'll hear the fake one immediately.
Step 5. Fix the profile, not the draft
When something comes back wrong, resist editing the draft and move on. Go add a line to the profile instead.
Wrong in what way? Say it plainly and add it:
"You keep making everything three items long. I don't do that."
"You keep summarizing at the end. I never summarize, I just stop."
"You're being clever in the first sentence. I'm never clever until the third one."
Mine has grown a line at a time for months and every single line exists because something annoyed me once.
The failures you'll hit, and what they mean
It writes ABOUT your voice instead of IN it. It'll produce something that mentions being warm and direct while sounding like nothing. Fix: give fewer adjectives and more examples.
It's got your words but not your rhythm. Usually because your samples were all short. Add something long you wrote.
It's you, but flattened. Your voice minus the weird bits. That's what happens when your samples were all polished. Go find something you wrote angry or tired.
It's perfect for two paragraphs and then drifts. Normal. Longer output drifts. Ask for it in shorter pieces, or paste the profile again at the point it started sliding.
It won't swear or be blunt when you would. Tell it explicitly that you use those words and it should too. It defaults polite, and polite is a voice, just not yours.
Where to keep it
In your project instructions, so it applies to everything without you pasting it again. Set Up Claude So It Already Knows You covers how.
If you're not using projects yet, keep it in a note and paste it at the top of anything that matters.
One warning. Once this works properly you'll start noticing which of your own writing sounds like you and which sounds like you performing, and that's a slightly uncomfortable thing to learn about yourself at nine at night.