context/voice.md

voice.md is what protects you from “AI-detectable email to a senior client” risk. It’s the file where the work pays off most directly — a good voice.md produces drafts that need light editing for senior recipients and near-zero editing for internal peers.

The principle: real examples beat synthetic ones every time. Generic instructions like “professional but warm” produce generic AI output. Five real sent emails of yours across different contexts produce drafts in your voice.

What to include

• Four to six real sent emails of yours, sanitised, varied by recipient seniority and context
• A short list of style notes (UK vs US spelling, sign-off, sentence length tendencies)
• A list of phrases you’d never use — calibrated to your specific cringe list, not generic AI tells
• Your specific tics — punctuation habits, paragraph length, openers and closers

What to exclude

• Confidential content from real emails — sanitise names, numbers, deals before pasting
• Emails you sent that you weren’t pleased with afterwards (use ones you were)
• Aspirational voice (“I want to write more crisply”) — Claude needs your actual voice, not your goal voice
• Examples that are more than 12 months old — voice drifts faster than people expect

Template

# Voice

## Style notes
- [UK / US] English spelling
- Prefer [short / medium / long] paragraphs, often [N] sentences
- Comfortable with em-dashes / not
- Avoid: "I hope this finds you well", "circling back", "touch
  base", "synergies"
- Sign-off: [whatever you actually use — "Best, [Name]" /
  "Cheers, [Name]" / etc]

## Examples by context

### Reply to senior internal stakeholder
[Paste a real example, sanitised]

### Reply to top-tier client — substantive question
[Paste a real example, sanitised]

### Reply to top-tier client — declining or pushing back
[The hardest one to write naturally — include a real example
if you have one]

### Reply to internal peer — quick coordination
[Paste a real example]

### Cold-ish outreach to industry contact
[Paste a real example]

### Forwarding with brief context
[Paste a real example]

## Patterns I lean on
- [Any specific opener/closer patterns you reuse]
- [Any structures, e.g. "I always end client replies with a
  clear next-step question"]

Why six examples and not three

Three examples isn’t enough variation. Claude generalises from the patterns it sees, and three examples in similar contexts produce drafts that are confidently in that one register — which is wrong for everything outside it.

Six examples spread across a meaningful range (junior peer, senior internal, substantive client, declining politely, cold outreach, forwarding) gives Claude enough variation to pick up which register fits which audience. Adding more than six produces diminishing returns.

How to find the examples

Search your sent items for these specific contexts:

1. Your last meaningful reply to your manager
2. Your last substantive reply to a top-tier client
3. The last time you said no to something via email
4. A coordination message you sent to a peer
5. The last time you reached out to someone you didn’t know well
6. A forward where you added context

If you can’t find one of these in the last six months, that’s information — either the context doesn’t actually come up for you, or it does and you’ve been letting things sit unanswered.

Sanitising without losing voice

The temptation is to edit the examples to remove anything sensitive. The risk is editing out the tics that make the email yours.

Two rules that work:

1. Replace nouns, not verbs. Change names, companies, numbers, project codenames. Keep the verbs and connective tissue exactly as you wrote them.
2. Replace specifics with generic equivalents of similar length. “Acme’s Q2 launch” becomes “[Client]‘s Q2 launch”, not “[the project]” — same shape, no detail.

A sanitised email should read the same length and the same shape as the original. If it reads shorter or smoother, you’ve over-edited.

How often to update

Quarterly. Replace the oldest example with a recent one each time. Voice drifts in subtle ways — six-month-old examples will produce drafts that sound a little like you a year ago, which is close enough to wrong to be uncomfortable.

Set a reminder. The maintenance is the difference between this file aging well and aging badly.