# Voice Techniques Reference

Techniques for injecting authentic brand voice into content. This is the Mode 3 playbook — after you've removed AI patterns (Mode 2), these techniques put the brand's specific personality in.

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## Step 1: Extract the Voice Profile

Before writing anything, extract the voice from examples. Ask for one piece of content the brand considers representative. Then answer these questions about it:

| Question | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Average sentence length? | Count words per sentence across 10 sentences. ≤15 = punchy. ≥25 = flowing. |
| Formality level? | Count contractions ("it's" vs "it is"). Count first-person. Count slang. |
| Use of humor? | Dry wit (unexpected juxtapositions). Self-deprecating (acknowledges own limitations). Provocateur (picks fights). None. |
| Relationship to reader? | Peer (we're both figuring this out). Expert (I know, you're learning). Challenger (you're probably wrong about this). |
| Signature phrases? | Phrases or constructions that appear more than once. That's the brand's verbal tic. |
| What do they avoid? | Listen for what's conspicuously absent. |

Document this as a voice profile before editing. Reference it throughout.

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## The Core Voice Types

### Voice Type 1: The Direct Expert

**Profile:** Short sentences. Confident claims. No hedging. No qualifications unless the qualification is the point. Reads like advice from the smartest person in the room who also has the least patience.

**Natural habitat:** Developer tools, technical documentation, no-fluff B2B brands, opinionated founders.

**Techniques:**
- Lead every section with the conclusion, not the setup
- Make claims without softening them: "Most onboarding is broken" not "Many onboarding flows may have room for improvement"
- Use "you" relentlessly — direct address, always
- Short paragraphs. Often 1-2 sentences.
- When listing, use the smallest number of words possible
- No rhetorical questions unless you're about to immediately answer them
- Swear if the brand does (a well-placed "this is genuinely terrible" signals authenticity)

**Before:** "It's important to consider that implementing an effective onboarding strategy can have significant positive impacts on user retention rates."

**After:** "Fix your onboarding. It's where you're losing them."

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### Voice Type 2: The Thoughtful Peer

**Profile:** Longer sentences when the thought requires it. Occasional vulnerability. Shares the thinking, not just the conclusion. Treats the reader as someone at roughly the same level.

**Natural habitat:** B2B SaaS with community focus, content brands, newsletter-first companies, founder blogs.

**Techniques:**
- Show the reasoning: "Here's how I think about this..." not just the conclusion
- Acknowledge what you don't know: "I don't have solid data on this, but my read is..."
- Share the mistake before the lesson: "We tried X first and it failed. Here's what we learned."
- Longer transitions: connect ideas, don't just jump to the next point
- Questions that earn their keep — rhetorical only when you're genuinely pointing at a tension
- First person plural ("we") where appropriate — but only if there actually is a "we"

**Before:** "Companies should invest in customer success to improve retention."

**After:** "I spent two years thinking retention was a marketing problem. It wasn't. Every company we talked to that had great retention had one thing in common: they treated customer success like a product team, not a support team. The product mindset made all the difference."

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### Voice Type 3: The Provocateur

**Profile:** Challenges received wisdom. Takes positions most people avoid. Enjoys being right when everyone else was wrong. Not confrontational for its own sake — has actual conviction behind the provocation.

**Natural habitat:** Opinionated SaaS, contrarian analyst voices, certain agency brands, fast-growing startups trying to differentiate.

**Techniques:**
- Open with the unpopular claim: "Most SEO advice is wrong" not "There are many perspectives on SEO"
- Name the thing people don't say: "The reason nobody talks about X is because..."
- Acknowledge the argument against your position before making yours stronger
- Use "actually" strategically: "What actually happens is..."
- When everyone agrees on something, be specific about what they're getting wrong
- Let the evidence land without fanfare — state the uncomfortable number, then wait

**Before:** "There are various approaches to content marketing that teams may find valuable."

**After:** "Your competitors' content marketing budgets are wasted. The average B2B blog post gets 300 views and zero conversions. The top 10% of pieces generate 90% of the value. Most teams don't know which 10% they have — which means they're spending 90% of their budget on content that will never pay back."

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### Voice Type 4: The Enthusiastic Practitioner

**Profile:** Genuine excitement about the craft. Energized by the detail. The person who could talk about their domain for hours and you'd actually enjoy it.

**Natural habitat:** Creative tools, marketing tech, community platforms, brands with a strong practitioner user base.

**Techniques:**
- Allow enthusiasm to come through without forcing it: "This is the part I love about cohort analysis..."
- Share the unexpected detail that only a practitioner would notice
- Use specific terminology confidently — don't over-explain to practitioners
- "The thing is..." as a transition — signals you're about to share the real insight
- Parenthetical asides that reveal depth: "(And yes, I know about [edge case] — that's a separate problem)"
- Let the complexity show when the complexity is interesting

**Before:** "Segmenting your audience allows for more targeted communication."

**After:** "Here's where audience segmentation gets genuinely interesting. Most people segment by company size or industry. That's fine. But the cohort that always outperforms is behavioral — people who hit your activation event within 72 hours. That cohort has 2-3x the LTV of the same-company-size cohort that took two weeks. The behavior tells you more than the firmographic ever will."

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## Specific Techniques Regardless of Voice Type

### The Personal Anecdote Injection

Every brand can use a personal anecdote — even B2B technical brands. The format:

**Setup:** "When we [did X thing in context]..."
**What happened:** "[Specific unexpected thing occurred]."
**The lesson:** "[The principle that explains it]."

The anecdote doesn't have to be dramatic. It just has to be real and specific. "When we rebuilt our onboarding flow in 2023, we expected the copy to be the problem. It was the loading time."

### The Honest Admission

Instantly humanizing. Rarely done by brands because it feels like weakness. But readers trust brands that admit:
- What they got wrong
- What they don't know
- What they tried that failed
- What surprised them

The format: "We thought X. We were wrong. What actually happened was Y."

### The Contrarian Setup

Works for any voice type. Setup: state the conventional wisdom. Then undercut it.

"Everyone says [thing]. The data shows [opposite thing]."

Or more subtle: "The conventional wisdom is [X]. That's mostly true. Except when [specific condition] — and that's where it gets interesting."

### Sentence Rhythm Signature

After analyzing the brand voice, identify the rhythm pattern and apply it:

- **Staccato brand:** Short sentence. Shorter. Done.
- **Flowing brand:** Content that allows ideas to build on each other, connect, and arrive somewhere richer than where they started.
- **Mixed cadence (most natural):** Long sentence establishing context. Short punch. Then another long one that goes somewhere. Then: done.

Once you know the pattern, apply it consistently throughout the piece.

### The Earned Ending

The last sentence of a piece should land. Not summarize. Not encourage. Land.

Techniques:
- **The hard cut:** State the core truth one final time, nakedly. No wrap-up.
- **The reversal:** Setup expectation, then subvert it in the last line.
- **The action:** Name the single most important thing to do next. One thing.
- **The honest admission:** "We're still figuring this out too."

Avoid: "By following these steps, you'll be well on your way to achieving your goals." Nobody reads that. Nobody trusts it.

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## Voice Injection Quality Check

After applying voice:
- [ ] Read the piece aloud — does it sound like a person you'd actually follow?
- [ ] Is every paragraph distinguishable from the others? (Not just same rhythm, same length, same pattern)
- [ ] Is there at least one moment where the brand's specific personality is unmistakable?
- [ ] Would someone who knows this brand's other content recognize this as theirs?
- [ ] Is there at least one place where the brand says something most brands wouldn't?
