Keep the Voice

---
name: keep-the-voice
description: "Build a personal voice guide from a writer's own strongest passages and use it to evaluate drafts or revisions for stylistic flattening. Use when a writer wants to name their sentence habits, rhythm, register, narrative distance, imagery, productive irregularities, or exclusions; compare original and edited versions; protect intentional choices during AI-assisted revision; or calibrate feedback against their own work rather than generic prose norms."
---

# Keep the Voice

Calibrate editorial feedback against the writer's own best work. Name the choices that make the prose itself, then assess whether a draft or revision fulfills those choices. Do not turn the guide into an imitation engine.

## Choose the mode

Use one or more modes according to the request:

- **Build:** Create a voice guide from representative samples.
- **Audit:** Read a draft against an existing or newly created guide.
- **Compare:** Evaluate an original and a revision for gains, losses, and flattening.
- **Refine:** Update a guide when the writer's understanding of their own practice changes.

## Set the evidence threshold

- Prefer three to five short samples from the writer's own work. Include different things the voice can do rather than five nearly identical passages.
- Accept fewer samples when necessary, but call the result a provisional passage profile rather than a stable account of the writer's voice.
- Ask the writer which samples represent their work at its best. Do not quietly equate the most polished sample with the most authentic one.
- Use the writer's stated intentions and exclusions, but verify whether they are visible in the samples.
- Never infer personal identity, diagnosis, or biography from stylistic patterns.
- Never reproduce the style of a named writer as a substitute for discovering the user's own choices. Discuss transferable craft features instead.

## Build the voice guide

### 1. Select voice anchors

Quote three to five sentences or short passages that provide useful calibration. For each, name the exact work being done by syntax, rhythm, diction, image, stance, omission, or structure.

### 2. Describe recurring choices

Analyze only patterns supported by evidence:

- sentence length, shape, accumulation, interruption, and rhythm;
- diction, level of formality, idiom, and tolerance for abstraction;
- narrative distance and the narrator's relationship to the material;
- how images, objects, sensory details, or comparisons enter the prose;
- how emotion is stated, displaced, withheld, or allowed to surface;
- how paragraphs, scenes, and endings release or refuse pressure;
- deliberate fragments, repetition, punctuation, ambiguity, tonal shifts, or other productive irregularities.

Describe effect and purpose, not merely frequency. "Uses fragments" is weak. "Uses isolated fragments after accumulative sentences to turn thought into impact" is useful.

### 3. Name the exclusions

Record specific moves that do not belong in this writer's work when the evidence or writer supports them. Prefer operational boundaries such as "does not explain an image after it lands" over vague claims such as "avoids bad prose."

### 4. Confirm the calibration

Summarize the voice in two sentences. Invite correction. When the user requested an immediate audit, proceed with a clearly labeled provisional calibration rather than stopping unnecessarily.

## Audit without sanding the prose down

Evaluate passages or revisions in four categories:

- **Strengthens:** Reaches further into an established choice or makes its effect more legible.
- **Preserves:** Changes the prose while retaining its characteristic effect.
- **Flattens:** Replaces a specific effect with a safer, more conventional, or merely cleaner one.
- **Unclear:** Changes the text in a way whose value depends on an intention not yet known.

Quote the original and revision when comparing versions. Explain what changed in the reader's experience. Do not reject every conventional edit; clarity can strengthen voice. Do not protect an awkward sentence merely because it is awkward. Test whether the choice is succeeding on its own terms.

When a stylistic feature may be either an error or an intentional device, ask:

1. Does the pattern recur meaningfully?
2. What effect does it create here?
3. Is that effect consistent with the voice guide?
4. Does the passage earn the difficulty it asks of the reader?

## Deliver the useful artifact

### Voice Guide

Include:

- voice anchors;
- sentence habits and their purposes;
- tonal temperature and register;
- narrative stance and distance;
- image and observation habits;
- productive irregularities;
- specific exclusions;
- a short instruction explaining how an editor or AI should apply the guide.

Keep the guide concise enough to reuse in later revision sessions.

### Flattening Audit

Include:

- passages that are fully alive in the writer's voice;
- edits that preserve or strengthen it;
- edits that flatten it and the exact loss involved;
- uncertain cases requiring a writer's decision;
- two or three revision priorities, not a comprehensive copyedit.

Do not generate a wholesale rewrite by default. When the writer requests alternatives, provide a few bounded versions and explain the stylistic tradeoff of each.