Nearly every brand voice document I have been handed by a new client says the same three words: friendly, professional, approachable. Nearly every one of those documents has failed, because no writer has ever sat down, read “friendly”, and known what to do next.
A voice guide is not a description of how you sound. It is a set of decisions, written clearly enough that a freelancer you have never met can follow them on their first day. This is how to build one in an afternoon, and how to keep it alive after the afternoon ends.
Why adjective lists fail
Three adjectives fail for a structural reason: they are not falsifiable. Nobody has ever aspired to be unfriendly or unprofessional, which means your list does not distinguish you from your competitors — it just proves you are not a villain.
Worse, adjectives are interpreted differently by everyone who reads them. “Friendly” to one writer means contractions and second person. To another it means exclamation marks and emoji. To a third it means calling the customer “mate”. All three then write for you, and your brand ends up sounding like a group chat.
A useful voice guide replaces adjectives with three things: positions on a scale, rules with examples, and a list of things you never say. The last one is the most powerful and the most often skipped.
Voice versus tone: the distinction that saves arguments
Voice is constant. Tone changes with context. Your voice is who you are; your tone is how that person behaves in a particular room.
You have one voice. You have as many tones as you have situations: an onboarding email, a service outage notice, a pricing page, a rejection message, a 404. Same personality; different register. Confusing the two is why teams end up either sounding robotic in warm moments or flippant in serious ones.
A good guide covers both. It defines the voice once, then gives tone guidance for the five or six situations your business actually encounters. Do not write tone guidance for hypothetical situations — write it for the messages you send every week.
If a piece of guidance would be equally true in a serious apology and a celebratory announcement, it belongs in the voice section. If it would not, it belongs in tone.
The four dimensions of a voice
Instead of adjectives, place your brand on four scales. Scales are useful because they are relative, arguable, and immediately actionable.
| Dimension | One end | The other end | What it decides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Formality | Casual — contractions, fragments, slang | Formal — full sentences, no contractions | Sentence construction, greetings, sign-offs |
| Warmth | Warm — first names, feelings acknowledged | Matter-of-fact — information first | How you open, how you apologise |
| Authority | Peer — “here’s what we’d try” | Expert — “here’s what you should do” | Hedging, recommendations, confidence |
| Playfulness | Playful — jokes, wordplay, surprise | Straight — clarity above all | Headlines, microcopy, error messages |
Mark your position on each with a number from one to five, and — this is the part that matters — write a sentence explaining why. “Authority: 4. Our customers are anxious first-time buyers who want to be told what to do, not offered options.” That sentence resolves a hundred future arguments.
Then mark where you are not. “Playfulness: 2. We work with people in acute pain. Cleverness reads as indifference.”
Running the voice workshop
Ninety minutes, four to six people, at least two of whom talk to customers directly. Whiteboard or shared doc. Here is the running order I use.
1. The person exercise (15 min). “If our brand were a person at a dinner party, who is it — and who is it definitely not?” Ban celebrity comparisons; make them describe behaviour. Does this person interrupt? Do they explain things people did not ask about? Do they admit uncertainty?
2. Scale placement (20 min). Everyone marks the four scales privately, then reveals at once. The disagreements are the entire point. Where two people are three points apart, you have found a real inconsistency in your existing communications.
3. The artefact review (25 min). Put five real pieces of your writing on the wall — an email, a homepage section, a social post, an invoice reminder, a customer service reply. For each, ask: does this sound like the person we just described? Mark the specific lines that do and do not. Real artefacts stop the conversation drifting into aspiration.
4. Never-say list (15 min). Everyone writes down words and phrases the brand should never use. Industry jargon, corporate filler, borrowed Americanisms, anything that appeared on three competitor sites. This list is often the most-used page of the finished guide.
5. Draft three rules (15 min). Not ten. Three, agreed in the room, each phrased as an instruction with an example.
Writing rules people can actually follow
A rule is followable when it tells a writer what to do, includes an example, and can be checked by someone who was not in the workshop. Compare:
| Unfollowable | Followable |
|---|---|
| “Be approachable” | “Use contractions everywhere. Write ‘you’ll’, not ‘you will’. Exception: legal and safety notices.” |
| “Be confident” | “Make one clear recommendation before listing options. Delete ‘we think’, ‘perhaps’ and ‘it might be worth’ unless genuinely uncertain.” |
| “Be human” | “Name the person responsible in service messages: ‘I’ve fixed this’, not ‘this has been resolved’.” |
| “Keep it simple” | “One idea per sentence. If a sentence needs a semicolon to survive, split it.” |
| “Be empathetic” | “In any message delivering bad news, acknowledge the impact before explaining the cause.” |
Aim for eight to twelve rules total. Beyond that, nobody reads them, which is functionally the same as not having them.
The “we say this, not that” table
This single table does more work than the rest of the guide combined, because it needs no interpretation. Build at least fifteen rows, drawn from your real writing.
| We say | Not | Because |
|---|---|---|
| “Book a call” | “Schedule a discovery session” | Nobody says ‘discovery session’ out loud |
| “What it costs” | “Investment” | Euphemism reads as evasion |
| “We got this wrong” | “Mistakes were made” | Passive voice hides the person |
| “People who use this” | “Users” | Our customers are practitioners, not users |
| “Here’s what I’d do” | “Here are some options to consider” | They came for a recommendation |
| “Free” | “Complimentary” | Say the short word |
Add a “because” column. Without it, the table looks like arbitrary taste and gets ignored the moment someone senior disagrees.
Testing your voice on a stranger
Two tests, both cheap, both revealing.
The blind test. Take three paragraphs of your copy, strip the logo and any brand names, and put them beside three paragraphs from your two closest competitors. Show the set to five people who know your market. Ask them to guess which is yours. If they cannot beat chance, your voice is not yet distinctive — you have a house style, not a voice.
The freelancer test. Give your guide, and nothing else, to a competent writer who has never worked with you. Ask for 200 words on any topic. What comes back tells you exactly which rules are clear and which are decoration. Every gap you find is a gap that would otherwise have surfaced in published work.
A voice guide that has never been tested on someone outside the room is a document about how you feel, not a tool for how you write.
Keeping it alive after the guide is written
Most voice guides die within six months. The ones that survive share four habits.
- They live where the writing happens. Not a PDF in a drive folder — a page in the tool your team writes in, linked from the brief template.
- They have an owner. One named person who approves changes. Voice by committee reverts to the mean within a quarter.
- They grow examples, not rules. When something is written particularly well, it gets added to the guide as an example. The rules stay at a dozen; the example library grows forever.
- They get reviewed twice a year, briefly. Thirty minutes. What did we write that did not sound like us? What rule keeps getting broken, and is the rule wrong?
One more thing, and it matters more than the format. A voice guide only works if the brand it describes is one the business actually is. If your rules say “we admit mistakes plainly” and your leadership will not sign off on an honest apology, the guide will lose, every time. Voice is downstream of behaviour. Write the guide for the company you are, or change the company first.