Guide
Tone of voice examples
The difference between an adjective and a rule, shown rather than argued.
Search for tone of voice examples and you get a list of brands described in adjectives: playful, bold, warm, irreverent. Useful for admiring somebody else. Useless for writing your own next paragraph. The examples below are the other kind: rules a writer, or whichever AI tool you draft in, can follow, taken from businesses that were measured rather than described.
Example one
Pronoun policy
Two businesses, one writer. A fractional executive practice says "I" 133 times per ten thousand words and "we" 22 times. A property care and decorating business by the same hand says "we" 342 times and "I" not once. Neither had ever written that down, and each would have produced a wrong draft for the other in the first sentence.
The adjective
"We are personal and approachable."
Both businesses would claim this. It tells the next writer nothing about which word to type.
The rule
"First person singular throughout. "We" is banned; there is one person here and the reader should be able to tell."
A new hire, or ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini, can be held to that in the first line.
Pronoun policy is the single most useful thing to write down about a voice, and one of the least useful to score, because there is no right answer. Both businesses above scored in the top band on distinctiveness with opposite policies. What matters is that the policy is deliberate and stated.
Example two
Rhythm and landing
Across six real businesses measured while building the method, sentence-length variance ran between 7.7 and 9.7. A control passage written deliberately to sound competent and mean nothing scored 4.3, and the two ranges never overlapped. Between 15% and 29% of real sentences were five words or fewer. The control managed none.
The adjective
"Punchy, clear, easy to read."
Every business in the sector claims it. The control passage would claim it too.
The rule
"Median eleven words, longest fifty. One sentence in six under five words. Use the short one where the argument turns, never as a headline gimmick."
Three counts, each checkable on any draft in a spreadsheet.
Notice what the rule does not say. It does not say short. Long sentences are where this particular voice stacks its evidence, and flattening them would remove the thing that makes the argument land. The rule protects the range rather than picking a side of it.
Example three
Money in the sentence
The adjective
"Transparent about pricing."
A claim, and one every competitor also makes.
The rule
"Prices go in the sentence, next to the claim they support, never in a bracket or a table below the fold. "A Diagnostic Day is from £1,450 and the written plan lands within 48 hours.""
A writer knows exactly where the number goes and a reader never has to hunt for it.
The evidence measure is the lightest of the four scored, and the easiest to move. Many sites contain no figure of any kind. Adding one number to a page is the commonest prescription there is, and it is the one most guides never mention because it does not sound like a matter of tone. It is.
Example four
Saying no, and delivering bad news
The awkward cases are where a voice is actually tested, and where a stand-in writer most needs a ruling. Here is one, from a business whose whole register depends on it.
The adjective
"Honest but kind."
Which is what everybody hopes to be, right up until the email has to be written.
The rule
"Say the no in the first sentence. Give one reason, not three. Name where else to look. Never apologise for the answer, only for any delay in giving it."
Four instructions, in order, that produce the same email whoever writes it, Gemini and Copilot included.
A ruling like that is worth more than a page of description, because it settles an argument the business will otherwise have every time the situation comes up. The same goes for pricing, for writing about AI, for chasing a payment, and for the first paragraph of a proposal. Write the ruling once and the argument stops.
The test of a voice
It survives a complaint and a joke
The worry people raise about writing any of this down is that everything will end up sounding the same. It is the right worry and it points at the wrong target. A person's voice is recognisable across a complaint, a eulogy and a joke without those three being alike, and a specification describes how you sound, not what you say.
Where a business has several speaking roles, the rules go a step further and say how the register is allowed to shift between them: a chief executive and a support desk should not sound identical, and should still sound like the same company. That is still a rule, and still checkable.
Every example above was found by counting first and describing second. Paste a page of your own into the free test and it will show you the numbers behind at least two of them.
An adjective describes an impression. A rule produces one.
See your own examples
The free test quotes back the sentences that are genuinely yours and names the ones that could have come from anybody. A Wordprint turns the whole set into rules like the ones above, for your business, from your own words.
Written by Ian, with Claude assisting, and scored by the smarticulate method at 97.9 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, ChatGPT custom instructions for your brand voice, how to measure brand voice.