Template
A brand voice guide template, with the hard part marked
Twelve sections, free to take. Five of them cannot be filled in by hand, and that is the point.
Most brand voice guide templates are a page of adjectives with blanks in them, and a guide written from one changes nothing, because "warm but authoritative" is true of your competitor too. This template is the structure a Wordprint uses, given away whole, with an honest note against each section saying whether you can do it by hand.
Take it
The template, as a file
A plain markdown file with the twelve headings and a line under each saying what goes there. Open it in anything, fill in what you can, and delete the two lines at the top when you are done.
If you were searching for a brand voice generator: this is the opposite of one. A generator produces copy. This produces the rules that stop copy sounding like everybody else's, and the rules come from what you have already written, not from a form.
The twelve sections
What goes in each, and whether a template can give it to you
| Section | How it gets filled |
|---|---|
| 1. The one paragraph The whole voice in one paragraph, and every claim in it carries a number. "Short sentences by default, median eleven words, with one in six under five" is a rule. "Punchy" is a mood. This is the section most templates put a mood in, and it is the reason most guides go in a drawer. | hand, badly; measured, well |
| 2. What this business believes Three to five positions a competitor would argue with, each in one sentence, each backed by a line you have already published. If nobody would argue with it, it is not a belief, it is the sector. | hand |
| 3. Who is being spoken to The reader as a person with a situation, and how the register shifts between readers if it does. Most businesses have two readers and write for a third who does not exist. | hand |
| 4. The measurements The twenty-two counts: sentence length and its spread, how often a sentence lands, phrasebook terms and figures per ten thousand words, and the eighteen habits reported for the record. This is the section a template cannot give you, because it is about your pages, not about templates. | measured |
| 5. Idiom The ten words and constructions that are yours, quoted from your own pages. Not the ones you like; the ones you use. | measured, then chosen by hand |
| 6. Punctuation and mechanics What you use and what you never use, each with its rate. A business that has never typed a long dash needs to say so, because every AI tool will type one for it. | measured |
| 7. What this voice will not do Five rules with reasons. The reason is the part a new hire remembers. | hand, from the evidence |
| 8. Before and after Four pairs: the sentence as anybody would write it, then as this business writes it. Both real, or the second half is fiction. | hand |
| 9. Awkward cases, with rulings A complaint, a price rise, a joke, saying no, bad news. For each, what the voice does, ruled on. A guide that describes the voice and never rules on a hard case is describing the weather. | hand, and the section a person earns their fee on |
| 10. Five checks before anything is published Five yes-or-no questions a draft must pass in under a minute. If a check takes judgement, it is not a check. | hand |
| 11. The prompt pack Sections 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7 compressed into rules a model can be held to, and nothing else from the document. It is the only section ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini should ever be given, because a model told what the business believes will start believing it back at you. | derived |
| 12. What this cannot tell you What the evidence did not cover, so nobody mistakes the gaps for rules. The most honest section and the one every template leaves out. | hand |
Seven sections are yours to write with a pen and an afternoon. Five need counting, and the counting is the difference between a guide and a specification: a rule a new hire can be held to has a number in it, and so does a rule a model can be held to.
The template is the easy part. The measurements are the guide.
Filling in the measured sections
Two routes, one free
The Anyone Test counts one page at a time in your browser, in about a minute, and quotes back the sentences that are yours. Run it on your three most-read pages and you have section 4 in rough, section 5 in raw form, and section 6 near enough. It stores nothing and sends nothing.
A Wordprint reads the whole site, fills in all twelve, and the Desk version adds the rulings in section 9 from a person who has read the evidence. If you fill the template in yourself first, the Wordprint will tell you where you were wrong about your own writing, which is the useful part.
One warning either way. Do not fill in section 1 first. Everybody does, it comes out as adjectives, and the rest of the document then defends them. Fill in 4, 5 and 6, then write 1 from what they say.
What the template is not
Three limits
It is not a tone-of-voice wheel, a personality archetype or a set of brand values; those describe how a business would like to sound. It is not a style guide, which covers spelling and capitals and says nothing about voice. And it is not finished when the blanks are full: a guide is finished when a draft can be checked against it in a minute and fail.
Rules with numbers in them. Everything else is wine tasting.
Start with the counting
Paste a page you have published and get the four scored measures and the eighteen reported ones, which is sections 4 to 6 of the template in a minute.
Written by Ian, with Claude assisting, and scored by the smarticulate method at 97.8 out of 100 before it went up. Ian spent twenty-odd years turning thinking, his own and other people's, into something a board would act on, and built smarticulate to put numbers on it. His practice is ConsultingPartner.io: enterprise experience, right-sized. Who is he? →
More guides: how to write brand voice guidelines, how to measure brand voice, tone of voice examples.