# Brand voice guide: [business name]

The twelve-section structure of a smarticulate Wordprint, empty. Fill in what you can by hand;
the sections marked "measured" need counting, and the free test at smarticulate.io/anyone-test
does the counting for one page at a time. Delete these two lines when you are done.

## 1. The one paragraph
How the business sounds, in one paragraph, with a number behind every claim. Not "friendly and
professional": median sentence length, how often a short sentence lands, which phrases recur,
who is speaking and to whom.

## 2. What this business believes
Three to five positions a competitor would argue with, each in one sentence, each with the
line from your own writing that shows it.

## 3. Who is being spoken to
The reader, named as a person with a situation, and how the register shifts between readers
if it does.

## 4. The measurements (measured)
Median sentence length. Longest sentence. Share of sentences at five words or fewer. Sentence
length variance. Phrasebook terms per ten thousand words. Figures per ten thousand words.
Contractions, questions, "you", "we", "I", colons, semicolons, dashes, exclamation marks, per
ten thousand words.

## 5. Idiom
The words and constructions that are yours. Ten at most, quoted from your own pages.

## 6. Punctuation and mechanics
What you use and what you never use, with the rate for each. Capitals, numbers, currency,
dates, lists.

## 7. What this voice will not do
Five things, each stated as a rule, each with the reason.

## 8. Before and after
Four pairs: a sentence as anybody would write it, then the same sentence as this business
writes it. Both real.

## 9. Awkward cases, with rulings
A complaint. A price rise. A joke. Saying no. Bad news. For each: what the voice does, ruled
on rather than described.

## 10. Five checks before anything is published
Five questions a draft must pass, each answerable yes or no in under a minute.

## 11. The prompt pack
The standing instruction for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini: sections 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7
compressed into rules a model can be held to, and nothing else from this document.

## 12. What this cannot tell you
What the evidence did not cover, so nobody mistakes the gaps for rules.