A worked example
A Soundalike, in full
Two businesses, one writer, 9.7 points apart.
Every other thing on this site is measured on businesses that cannot be named, because they agreed to be measured and not to be advertised. This one is different. Both of the businesses below are mine, so there is nobody to protect and nothing to withhold, and you can read the whole £95 report exactly as a customer receives it.
It also settles the question people ask first. The same person writes both of these. If this instrument were measuring the writer rather than the business, the two would land in the same place. They are nine and a half points apart, and the reasons are in the table.
Nothing below has been edited, tidied or reordered. The only thing removed is the covering email.
Soundalike report: smarticulate
2 businesses measured on the same instrument, on the same day, from what each of them has published. Every number below comes from code that returns the same answer every time it is run. Nobody was asked for anything, nothing was submitted, and no party could influence the result by explaining itself, which is the only thing that makes a ranking like this worth reading.
Where you sit
| smarticulate | ConsultingPartner.io | |
|---|---|---|
| Distinctiveness | 91.4 | 81.7 |
| Own words, out of 35 | 35 | 35 |
| Rhythm, out of 30 | 30 | 20.3 |
| Landing, out of 25 | 25 | 25 |
| Evidence, out of 10 | 1.4 | 1.5 |
| Prose measured | 1,730 words | 1,472 words |
Out of 100, weighted own words 35, rhythm 30, landing 25, evidence 10. What each measure counts, and the eighteen more that are taken and deliberately not scored, is set out at how the score works.
How far apart you are
The closest of them to you is ConsultingPartner.io, 9.7 points away. That is a real difference and a small one. It shows up to somebody comparing you side by side, and not to somebody reading one of you on a Tuesday.
You are the more distinctive of the two. That is worth protecting deliberately rather than by luck, because at the moment nothing is holding it in place except whoever writes.
One thing that number does not mean, and it would be dishonest to leave it out: a higher score is not a bigger business. A firm can rank last here and out-sell everybody else on price, on reach, or on being better at the actual work. What the ranking tells you is how hard it is for a buyer to tell you apart, which is a different question and usually a cheaper one to fix.
How each of you writes
The habits underneath the score. None of these is good or bad on its own: they are the things a reader feels without ever naming them, and the places where two businesses turn out to be doing the same thing are the places a buyer stops being able to tell you apart.
| smarticulate | ConsultingPartner.io | |
|---|---|---|
| median sentence length | 13 words | 9 words |
| longest sentence | 47 words | 36 words |
| how much of the page is prose rather than headings | 100% | 100% |
| contractions | 23.1 per 10,000 words | 210.6 per 10,000 words |
| use of "you" | 560.7 per 10,000 words | 258.2 per 10,000 words |
| use of "we" | 11.6 per 10,000 words | 61.1 per 10,000 words |
| questions asked | 23.1 per 10,000 words | 47.6 per 10,000 words |
| hedging phrases | 0 | 0 |
| colons | 63.6 per 10,000 words | 108.7 per 10,000 words |
These are nine of the eighteen measures that are reported and never scored, deliberately: they describe writing accurately and they cannot tell a real voice from a competent fake, which is why only four of the twenty-two carry marks.
The phrasebook you share
No phrase from the category phrasebook appears in more than one of these businesses. That is unusual, and it is good: whatever is making you hard to tell apart, it is not shared vocabulary.
What is yours alone
Words that appear in your writing and in none of theirs: sentence,
published, reading, cannot, specification,
difference, evidence, account, browser,
arrives, rewrite, phrases, starts,
writes, paying, habits, distinctiveness,
measurements, assistance, adjectives.
This is where a vocabulary nobody else in this field owns already exists in embryo. Most of it got there by accident, which is exactly why it is fragile: nothing is currently protecting it from the next person, or the next tool, that writes on your behalf.
The best line each of you has
Quoted exactly as published. Nothing here has been rewritten, by a person or otherwise.
smarticulate. If it tells you something you did not know, there is a conversation worth having.
ConsultingPartner.io. The pattern holds in every trade: position on value, not price, and the right customers find you.
Yours is above. If it is not the first thing a visitor reads, that is a free improvement available this afternoon: you have already written it, it is already yours, and it is in the wrong place.
What to do about it
- Build on what is yours alone. The vocabulary above is the raw material. Use those words on purpose and more often, and watch which ones a client repeats back to you.
- Put a number in it. You score 1.4 out of 10 on evidence, which counts figures, prices, dates and named specifics. It is the lightest of the four marks and the quickest to move: one real number in the paragraph that matters does more for a reader deciding between you than any amount of rewriting.
- Move your best line. It exists. It is buried. That is one edit.
- Write the rules down, or this reverts. Everything here describes a moment in time. Without a specification, the next person who writes for you, or the next tool, pulls you straight back towards the middle, because the middle is where the tools start from. That is what a Wordprint is.
This report diagnoses and stops there. It does not rewrite a word of anybody's copy, deliberately: a tool that produced polished replacement text on demand would be the exact thing smarticulate exists to object to.
What this example is not
It is not a flattering pick. I ran it on the two businesses I had, in the order I had them, and published what came back. The evidence score of 1.4 out of 10 is the worst number on the page and it is mine.
It is not a client result either, and it cannot be. The businesses this method was built on agreed to be measured, not advertised, so they can never appear here. That constraint is the reason this page exists: these two are mine, so I can show you the whole thing.
And it is not a specification. It answers one question, which is whether a buyer could tell two firms apart, and then it stops.