Prompt

Generate your writing style guide

Get a reusable description of how you write — so you can drop it into any new chat and the output actually sounds like you.

writing workflow

When to use this

You keep getting AI output that sounds generic or stiff
You're about to write cover letters, LinkedIn posts, emails, or anything public-facing
You want something reusable you can drop into any new chat

What you'll get

A description of your tone, voice, and sentence structure
Your "banned words" — the phrases that aren't you
Formatting preferences
A reusable block you can paste into any chat, on any platform

Why the prompt is the easy part

The prompt itself is simple. What makes this actually work is the material you bring to it. The AI can only describe your voice if it has enough of your writing to work from — and "enough" is more than you might think.

One email isn't enough. A LinkedIn post you wrote in five minutes isn't enough. The more varied and authentic the samples, the more accurate and useful the style guide. Think: writing where you weren't trying to sound professional, writing you did fast, writing you're actually proud of.

The good news: the style guide is a living thing. Generate it now with what you have, use it for a while, and regenerate it when you have more material. It gets better over time.

💡 the quality test

Read the output out loud. Does it sound like you describing yourself, or does it sound like a LinkedIn bio someone else wrote? If it's the latter, your samples were probably too formal or too few. Add messier, more casual writing and try again.

📄 save it as markdown

When you save your style guide, save it as a .md file rather than a Word doc or PDF. Markdown is the lightest format for an AI to read back — cheaper on tokens, faster to process, and it works everywhere. A plain text file works too. The goal is something you can paste or attach without friction.

How to provide your samples

Pick whichever approach fits where you're starting from.

📋

Paste directly easiest

Copy and paste writing samples right into the chat before running the prompt. Works everywhere, no setup. Good for 2–5 pieces. Emails, Slack messages, anything — the more varied the better.

📎

Upload files

Attach Word docs, PDFs, or text files to the chat. Useful if your best writing is already saved somewhere. Most AI tools support file uploads — check your tool's interface for the attachment option.

🔗

Point at a URL underrated

If you have a LinkedIn profile, a blog, or anything published online, just paste the URL and ask the AI to read it. Your LinkedIn "About" section alone is often surprisingly representative of your voice — even if you don't think of it that way.

📁

Use a shared folder

If you have a lot of writing scattered around, drop samples into a Google Drive or similar folder and connect it to your AI tool. Good for someone who wants to keep adding material over time and regenerate the style guide periodically. In Claude, you can connect Google Drive as an integration and give Claude access to a specific folder.

💬

Let the AI interview you nothing to prepare

No writing samples at all? Add "I don't have samples to share — ask me questions to understand how I write and communicate" to the prompt. It's less precise than samples, but it's a legitimate starting point. You can always regenerate later with real material.

The prompt Provide your samples first, then run this

Copy prompt

Generate a summary of how you would describe my writing style and tone, based on the samples I've shared. I want to be able to give this description to an AI tool in a new chat so that anything it writes for me — cover letters, emails, posts, whatever — sounds more like me and less like a template. Include: overall tone and voice, sentence structure patterns, words or phrases I tend to use, words or phrases that aren't me (the "banned list"), formatting preferences, and anything else that would help another AI write in my voice. Format it as a reusable block I can copy and paste.

What to do with the output

The style guide is only useful if you actually use it. A few ways to make that frictionless:

→ Save it somewhere you'll find it. A note, a doc, a project file — somewhere you can copy from it quickly. The goal is zero friction when you need it.

→ Drop it at the start of any writing chat. Just paste it in before you ask for help with a cover letter, post, or email. One extra step, noticeably better output.

→ Put it in your context doc. If you're using a stable "context of you" document (see the Build the context of you page), your style guide belongs in there. That way it travels with you automatically.

→ Regenerate it periodically. The more writing you accumulate, the better the style guide gets. Worth revisiting every few months or when your output starts feeling off again.

→ Make multiple versions. Your Slack voice and your LinkedIn voice are different. You can run the prompt with different samples to get context-specific style guides — one for casual writing, one for professional content, one for wherever you write most.

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