I kept asking Claude to write things in my voice, and it kept getting close but not quite there. Instead of fixing the same stuff by hand every time, I figured I'd write down what “sounds like me” actually means, once, and turn it into a Claude skill.

For those of you who don't know, a skill is just a folder of instructions Claude reads before it starts a task (I love the Impeccable skills for this, they have anti-slop checks built in so the output doesn't read like a chatbot). A voice skill is the same idea, just pointed at how one specific person writes.

How I built it

The process was pretty straightforward:

  1. I collected a big pile of my writing, the polished stuff but also old school papers, a speech, my college supplements, project writeups, even DMs. The wider the range, the easier it is to see what you actually do.
  2. I read all of it at once and tried to name my habits, which is the hard part, because you can't see your own voice.
  3. I wrote the rules down as plainly as I could, stuff like never use an em-dash, open on a little scene and circle back to it at the end, and write what you did, not what the thing is.
  4. I tested it constantly, drafting something and then looking for the exact spot where it stopped sounding like me. Every miss became a new rule.
  5. I marked which habits to keep and which to fix, because (this surprised me) it copies all your bad ones too.

Then I just kept testing and adding rules until the drafts stopped being so obviously AI and so obviously corny.

What surprised me

Mostly, how many tics I have that I never noticed. I open paragraphs with “So” and “Through this experience.”I end on an exclamation mark instead of a period, because a period feels too cold to me. I bookend almost everything. I stretch letters out when I'm excited (tonsssss). I prefer a direct simple sentence over a flowery one, and I write directly to the audience.

Would I recommend it?

Maybe! I've found you might be able to have AI do part of the writing, but without substance, it defaults to AI-slop pretty fast. Still, it's an interesting experiment regardless, and I'm excited to see if it actually helps my writing time be used more efficiently.