# Voice Preservation — Anti-Corporate-Speak Discipline

This reference answers exactly one decision: **what does it mean to "preserve the user's voice" in capture output, and what concrete patterns must be avoided?**

## The Core Rule

If the user said it casually, restate it casually. If the user said it crudely, restate it crudely (within the user's own register). Capture is for THEM, not for an imagined corporate audience reading their notes later.

> **Restating someone's casual idea in corporate language is a tax. It feels formal but it loses the energy that made the idea worth capturing.**

## Concrete Anti-Patterns (Side-by-Side)

| User said | ❌ Corporate-ified (anti-pattern) | ✅ Voice-preserved |
|---|---|---|
| "build something crazy with AI" | "Explore innovative AI-driven solutions" | "Build something crazy with AI" |
| "the dating app idea but for ferrets" | "Pet-companion matching platform leveraging social-graph principles" | "Dating app for ferrets" |
| "figure out the damn pricing already" | "Conduct comprehensive pricing strategy analysis" | "Figure out pricing (final answer)" |
| "fuck around with Consensus MCP" | "Investigate Consensus MCP integration opportunities" | "Try out Consensus MCP" |
| "make the landing page not suck" | "Optimize landing page user experience metrics" | "Make the landing page not suck" |
| "talk to Sarah about the thing" | "Schedule alignment discussion with Sarah re: outstanding initiative" | "Talk to Sarah about the thing" |
| "I'm tired of debugging this" | "Investigate root causes of recurring debugging friction" | "Tired of debugging this — find the root cause" |

## What Counts As "Voice"

- **Register** — formal vs casual, dry vs energetic, ironic vs earnest
- **Vocabulary** — the user's exact noun choices for things ("ferrets", "thing", "Sarah" — not "pets", "initiative", "stakeholder")
- **Cadence** — short choppy phrases stay short; long flowing thoughts stay flowing
- **Profanity / slang** — preserve as-is; don't sanitize
- **Self-talk markers** — "ugh", "actually", "wait", "ok so" — these signal genuine thinking and belong in the captured form

## What's Allowed to Change

- **Punctuation cleanup** — adding a period, fixing typos
- **Imperative reframing** for the Tasks section — "I should email Sarah" → "Email Sarah" (one-word edit, voice preserved)
- **Light disambiguation** — if "the thing" is genuinely confusing in context, note it but ask to clarify (don't replace it silently)

## What's Never Allowed

- Replacing user nouns with "platform" / "solution" / "initiative" / "framework"
- Verbing nouns: "let's research" → "let's conduct research"
- Adding qualifiers the user didn't say: "explore", "leverage", "deep dive into"
- "Action-itemizing" everything: "talk to Sarah" → "Establish communication touchpoint with Sarah"
- Removing emotion: "I'm pissed about X" → "There is a concern regarding X"
- Bullet-point fluff: "Implement", "Establish", "Facilitate" prefixes added for no reason

## Cluster Naming

When clustering items into projects (Section 1), the project name **MUST** use the user's words. Examples:

| Items in cluster | ❌ Anti-pattern name | ✅ Voice-preserved name |
|---|---|---|
| "ferret app", "ferret features", "ferret marketing" | "Pet Companion Platform" | "Ferret App" |
| "Q3 launch", "Q3 pricing", "Q3 emails" | "Q3 Go-to-Market Initiative" | "Q3 Launch" |
| "fix the auth bug", "auth tests", "rewrite login" | "Authentication System Modernization" | "Auth fixes" |

If the user used multiple terms for the same cluster, pick the one they used most or most colloquially.

## Operating Test

Before writing each line, ask:

> Would the user *recognize* this as something they'd say?

If no, you've drifted. Rewrite to match their register.

## Why This Matters

Voice preservation isn't aesthetic — it's functional. Two reasons:

1. **Recognition.** The user reads their own captured dump back in 2 days and needs to instantly recognize "yes, that's me, that's what I meant." Corporate restatement breaks recognition. The user thinks "wait, did I actually say that?" and starts second-guessing the rest of the output.

2. **Energy.** A dump captured in voice retains the *why* behind each item — the frustration, the excitement, the half-formed hope. Corporate restatement strips the why and leaves a list of generic action items that no one is excited to act on.

Capture is the user's brain on paper. Don't translate it into a stranger's brain.
