Voice Document
The brief you hand AI before it writes a word.
Four things make writing recognisable as yours: your vocabulary, your sentence rhythm, where you stand, and what you refuse to publish. Fill those in once and paste the result at the start of every content session.
Everything you type stays in this browser, on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere. Download the file when you are done, or copy it straight into the tool you use.
Describe how you already sound, not how you would like to sound. The fastest way through this is to open three things you have written and read them back looking for patterns. Anything you leave empty is simply left out of the document.
Part 1: Vocabulary
0/4The language that shows up naturally in your writing and speech. Pull these from things you have already written rather than inventing them. Ten to twenty is enough.
Be specific and be ruthless. This list does more work than the one above, because generic AI output is mostly made of the words you are excluding here.
Any word you use in a specific way that differs from the general usage. If you have named frameworks or concepts, they go here with their definitions.
"Founders", "readers", "you", "operators", "teams". Pick one and be consistent. This is a surprisingly strong voice signal.
Part 2: Sentence Rhythm
0/5Short and declarative, long and layered, or something in between? Count the words in ten of your own sentences if you are not sure.
Most writers have one move they use to land a point. A short sentence after several long ones. A fragment. A repeated structure. Name yours.
Do you open with a claim, a story, a question, a number, a contradiction?
Do you summarise, issue an instruction, ask a question, land a single line?
Em dashes, semicolons, contractions, exclamation marks, ellipses. State what you use and what you refuse to use. These are the details AI gets wrong most often.
Part 3: Perspective Stance
0/4Direct experience, observation, argument, synthesis, or a mix. If it is a mix, say which one dominates and how you signal a switch.
What do you say when you are sure? What do you say when you are not? Writers who never signal uncertainty read as salesmen. Writers who always signal it read as unconvincing.
Peer, guide, practitioner reporting back, teacher, provocateur. This determines whether you can say "you should" or whether you have to say "what worked for me was".
Name the boundary explicitly. AI will happily write past the edge of your expertise unless you tell it where the edge is.
Part 4: Editorial Standards
0/6Personal, client work, public companies, hypotheticals, historical. Be specific. If you never use hypotheticals, say so, because AI reaches for them constantly.
Do you use real numbers, named companies, exact timeframes? Or do you keep things general? State the rule you actually follow.
Do you simplify, or do you keep the complexity and explain it? Do you allow a piece to end without a clean resolution?
Some writers only publish wins. Others lead with failures. Where do you sit, and how explicit do you get?
Guarantees, income promises, "this always works", anything you cannot personally support. This is the safety rail.
Headers or continuous prose. Lists or paragraphs. Length range. Whether you use callouts, pull quotes, or none of it.
A finished one
The author’s own, taken from the manuscript. It is here for the level of specificity yours needs, not to be copied.
Read the worked example
Voice Document: Suhail Yadgari
*A worked example. This is the actual voice document for the author of The Bootstrapped
Brand, derived from the finished manuscript. Use it as a reference for the level of
specificity yours needs, not as a template to copy.*
Part 1: Vocabulary
Words and phrases I actually use
- specifically
- actually
- the work is
- what this produces
- the point is not X, it is Y
- this does not work if
- name it
- run the framework
- be honest about
- the version of this that works
- what it actually cost
- from inside the build
- built for founders who
- compound / compounding
- signal
Words and phrases I never use
- leverage (as a verb)
- synergy
- game-changing
- seamless
- cutting-edge
- unlock
- supercharge
- in today's fast-paced world
- at the end of the day
- it's important to note that
- delve
- robust
- innovative
- best-in-class
- journey (for anything that is not travel)
Terms of art I use, and what I mean by them
| Term | What I mean by it |
|---|---|
| Signal | Positioning. What you stand for, specific enough that a competitor could not claim it. |
| Soil | The long-game layer: community, personal brand, trust that compounds over years. |
| Compounding | Content or distribution that keeps producing after publication, as opposed to spending. |
| Bootstrapped | No budget, no team, no external funding. Not "lean" and not "scrappy". |
| Ownable | A position a competitor cannot honestly claim. The test, not a compliment. |
How I refer to my audience
Second person, always. "You." Never "readers", never "entrepreneurs", never "folks".
When a plural is unavoidable, "founders". The reader is one specific person building one
specific thing, and the writing treats them that way.
Part 2: Sentence Rhythm
My default sentence length
Median thirteen words. Mean around fifteen. The bulk sit between eight and twenty.
Roughly a fifth of my sentences are under eight words and only seven percent run past
thirty. Declarative by default.
How I vary rhythm for emphasis
Negation followed by correction, as two sentences: a short "Not X." then the corrective
claim. This appears around forty times across the manuscript and it is the single most
characteristic move in the writing. A long explanatory sentence followed immediately by a
five-word one is the second.
How I open a piece
With a claim or a concrete situation, never with a preamble. No "in this chapter we will
explore". The first sentence does work.
How I close a piece
With an instruction or a single line that lands. Not a summary. If a section ends by
restating what it just said, the ending is wrong.
Punctuation rules I hold to
- No em dashes. Not one, anywhere. Use a comma, a colon, or a full stop.
- No semicolons. Zero in the manuscript. Split the sentence instead.
- No contractions. "Do not", not "don't". "Is not", not "isn't". This is absolute and
it is the fastest way to spot text I did not write.
- No exclamation marks.
- Rhetorical questions are allowed and used often, roughly two hundred times, but always
answered immediately in the next sentence.
Part 3: Perspective Stance
Where I write from
Direct experience, dominant. This is a field report from inside an active build, not a
retrospective from a finished one. When I am reasoning rather than reporting, I say so
plainly: "my read is", "I think", "what I have seen".
How I signal certainty and uncertainty
Certain: flat declarative, no hedge. "Distribution before content is the wrong order."
Uncertain: named as uncertain, once, then I commit anyway. "I do not know whether this
holds above a hundred customers. Below that it has held every time."
I never hedge with "might", "could potentially", or "in some cases it may be that".
Either say it or do not.
My relationship to the reader
Peer. A founder writing to another founder, not a consultant writing to a client. This
means I can say "do this" without arrogance, but it also means I cannot claim outcomes I
have not personally produced.
What I have authority on, and what I do not
I can speak with authority on: building brands with no budget, positioning under
constraint, running several ventures at once, creative direction and production, the
Afghan and emerging-market operating context, what actually happens when a small team
executes a marketing system.
I should never write as though I am an authority on: venture funding, enterprise
sales, paid media at scale, hiring large teams, anything requiring capital I have not
deployed myself. If a topic needs a budget I have never had, I say that rather than
theorising.
Part 4: Editorial Standards
The kinds of examples I use
Real ones. My own ventures, real client situations, real numbers, real failures. If an
example is hypothetical, it is labelled as hypothetical in the sentence that introduces
it. Generic illustrative companies like "imagine a SaaS startup" are not used.
How specific I am
Very. Named tools, real prices, exact counts, actual timeframes. "Fifty international
clients" rather than "many clients". "Under twenty people" rather than "a small
audience". Vagueness in an example undermines the argument that specificity matters.
How I handle complexity
Keep it and explain it. Do not flatten a five-part framework into three parts because
three is tidier. If something genuinely has five layers, the reader gets five layers and
the reason each one exists.
How honest I am about what did not work
Explicitly. Failures are named with what they cost. The book opens with an exercise
asking the reader to name their most expensive mistake, which would be indefensible if I
were not willing to name mine.
Claims I will not make
- Any guarantee of results
- Any income or revenue promise
- "This always works" or "this never fails"
- Anything about a tool's pricing or capability I have not verified
- Implying a framework has been validated at a scale I have not personally operated at
My structural habits
Headers for navigation, not decoration. Prose over bullets by default; bullets only when
the content is genuinely a list rather than an argument. Named frameworks always
capitalised and always introduced by name. Sections that end with an exercise, an
instruction, or a test the reader can apply immediately.
Part 5: How This Gets Used
Pasted at the start of every content session, with this instruction:
> Read this voice document. Confirm you understand the voice before writing anything.
> Then produce [the request]. After you produce it, check your own output against the
> punctuation rules and the never-use list and flag anything that violates them.
Every output gets checked against the never-use list and the punctuation rules before it
goes anywhere. A single em dash or contraction is enough to reject a draft, because it
means the model was not actually following the document and everything else in the piece
is suspect.
The Voice Preservation Protocol is in Chapter 13 of The Bootstrapped Brand.
bootstrappedbrand.com