The voice sheet

One page per account. Built from an interview, not a questionnaire. Loaded before any draft is written for that person.

Keep it to a single page. A voice sheet long enough to require reading rather than skimming stops getting used, and an unused voice sheet is how a fleet converges.

The four sections

Rhythm

How this person's sentences actually move.

• Typical, shortest, and longest sentence length, counted from real samples.
• Whether they fragment, and how often.
• Paragraph length. One-liners or blocks.
• How they open: question, claim, number, scene, or anecdote. Record the distribution across their last ten pieces, not the one you like best.
• How they close: next action, callback, blunt stop, or question.

Lexicon

• Words they use that others in the fleet do not.
• Words they never use. This list prevents drift more reliably than the first one.
• Jargon tolerance. Do they say ARR or revenue, ICP or the people we sell to.
• Formality and profanity level.
• Their standard analogies and the examples they return to.

Hard rules

Per-person constraints that override any house style:

• Formatting they refuse. No emoji, no bold, no bullet lists.
• Topics they will not touch, including anything under legal or HR sensitivity.
• Claims they cannot make given their role. A CSM cannot announce roadmap.
• Disclosure requirements. When affiliation gets stated and how directly.

The anecdote bank

The section that gets skipped, and the one that does the most work.

Twenty to forty real stories from this person's actual work, each recorded in three or four lines: what happened, who was involved, the specific number or detail, and what it taught them.

A person's actual stories cannot be generated. That makes the bank the one component of voice that survives batch production intact. A fleet running on generated examples converges no matter how carefully the rhythm and lexicon are documented, because the examples are where sameness enters first.

Refill the bank quarterly in a 30-minute conversation. Banks run dry faster than anyone plans for, and a dry bank is the moment an account starts sounding like the others.

Sourcing

Collect 5 to 10 genuine samples per person, written before any assisted drafting. Mixing assisted and unassisted samples corrupts the sheet, because habits picked up from a model get recorded as the person's voice and then defended on every future draft.

If someone has never written publicly, run the interview and transcribe. Speech patterns transfer to the page better than an invented style does.

Using it

Load the sheet before drafting, not after. A draft written without it and then corrected against it keeps the structure it was born with, and structure is what readers register.

When the sheet and a fleet-wide style guide disagree, the sheet wins. That is its entire purpose.

Drift check

Once a quarter, pull three recent posts per account, strip the names, and ask someone who knows the team to attribute them. Attribution at better than chance across the fleet means the sheets are holding. At chance, the fleet has converged and the sheets need rebuilding from fresh samples.

Run the same check whenever a new drafter joins the production process. Convergence usually enters with a new writer working from the calendar instead of the sheets.