The Wordprint
How your business sounds, written down.
Everything your business publishes sounds like your business, whoever wrote it and whatever wrote it.
Most businesses have a voice and have never seen it described. It lives in the founder's head, leaks out unevenly, and disappears the moment somebody else writes on their behalf, whether that somebody is a new hire, an agency, or ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini.
A Wordprint is that voice, written down and made usable by every one of them.
Fifteen pages or so. Evidence, not adjectives. And it takes you off the end of the approval queue.
What is being captured
idiolect
noun · /ˈɪdiəʊlɛkt/
The version of a language spoken by exactly one person. Language, then dialect for a region, then idiolect for the individual. Yours was assembled from every place you have lived, everything you have read, and the people you spent your twenties with.
Everyone has one. Almost nobody has ever seen theirs written down. Forensic linguists use idiolect to attribute authorship in disputed wills and anonymous letters, which is to say it holds up in court. Your business has one too, and at the moment it is being quietly averaged away by software that has never met you.
A Wordprint is that idiolect, documented well enough to be handed to somebody else and followed without you in the room.
What it is
Three readers, one document
Everything in it comes from your own published words, and on the versions that include interviews, from hours of proper questions. Nothing is invented.
- You, when you are stuck on a paragraph. There is a section of awkward cases with rulings, and one of them will match.
- Anyone writing on your behalf. An agency, a new marketing hire, a founder's assistant. They should be able to produce a passable draft from the document alone, without ever having met you.
- Your software. The last section is a prompt pack, written for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini, in the form each of them actually takes instruction in. You paste it into the custom instructions, the project, or the system prompt, and everything the business produces afterwards starts from your specification instead of from the average of the internet.
That third reader is the commercial point. Agencies have sold tone-of-voice guides since the nineteen-eighties, and most of them go in a drawer within the month, because nothing anybody does daily depends on them. A Wordprint gets pasted into a system prompt on Monday. By Friday you can hear it in work you never touched.
What is in it
Evidence, then rules
Six of the twelve sections, about fifteen pages in all. The whole contents page would tell you less than these six do.
What you believe
The convictions your writing rests on, in your words. Most voice guides skip this entirely, which is why they are so easy to copy. Nobody can copy what you actually think.
The measurements
Sentence rhythm, the shape of your paragraphs, the punctuation you reach for, and how your register shifts when the audience changes. Counted, not guessed.
Your idiom
The phrases that are yours, the habitual moves you make without noticing, and the ones worth rationing before they become catchphrases.
What you will never do
The words, claims and constructions that are wrong for you. Prohibitions are more useful to a stand-in writer than any amount of encouragement.
Worked examples
Generic against yours, side by side, with a line on exactly what changed. This is how somebody learns a voice quickly.
Awkward cases, with rulings
How you price in writing. How you say no. How you deliver bad news. How you write about AI without sounding like everybody else who discovered it last year. This is the section people actually use.
How it is made
Listen, isolate, specify, install
Listen. Interviews, on the versions that include them, and a proper read of everything you have published. The search is for the sentences you say out loud and have never written down. There are always some.
Isolate. Separate the signal, meaning your actual convictions and idiom, from the noise you absorbed from your industry without noticing.
Specify. Write the document.
Install. This is the step most voice work skips, and it is why most voice work fails. Three live pieces get rewritten against the specification, so the rules have been proven on real work before anybody is asked to follow them. Then a working session with everybody who writes for you, including the person who mostly writes by pasting into ChatGPT and would never call themselves a writer. The prompt pack goes into the tools you actually run, and gets tested on your own drafts rather than demonstrated on somebody else's.
Afterwards you have three things: a document, a team who has used it once with somebody watching, and software that starts from your specification instead of from scratch.
The measurable parts are measured with code that returns the same answer every time, and how the score works sets out exactly what it counts. The judgement is a person's. Neither is left to a machine having a confident day.
Five working days for a Desk Wordprint, two weeks with the interviews, three for an organisation. The date is fixed in writing before anything begins.
What the software does, and where it stops
Code does the counting: sentence rhythm, connector habits, vocabulary drawn from the category phrasebook, how the register shifts between one section and the next. It is fast, it is reproducible, and it will find things nobody would notice by reading.
It stops at the point of judgement. Software can report that your writing is flat in the second half of the page. It cannot tell you that the cause is a change of costume when you start selling, that the fix is to write the service pages in the voice of the origin story, and that the sentence you are most tempted to cut is the best one you have. That part is twenty years of getting things said properly in rooms where it mattered, and it is what you are actually buying.
The result is a document nobody has to interpret. A new writer produces a passable draft from it on day one, and so does the software.
The question everybody asks first
Training ChatGPT in your own voice
Almost everyone has already tried. You open the custom instructions and type something like write in a friendly, professional, conversational tone, and what comes back is friendly, professional, conversational and completely interchangeable with your nearest competitor's.
The reason is worth understanding, because it is the same reason tone-of-voice guides fail. Those words describe an impression rather than a behaviour. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini all believe they are already being friendly and professional, and they are right. You have not constrained anything. You have agreed with the default.
Instruction only bites when a model can tell whether it has complied. Compare the two.
Does nothing
"Write in our brand voice: approachable, expert, human, and never salesy."
Four adjectives, no test. Nothing here can be failed.
Changes the output
"Never open with a question. One sentence in six is five words or fewer. Prices go in the sentence, not in a bracket. Never use: solutions, journey, seamless, passionate."
Four rules, all of them checkable, all of them yours.
A Wordprint is that second column, at length, derived from your own published writing rather than invented. Rhythm targets you already hit. The phrases that are genuinely yours and worth protecting. The words you will never use, which is the most useful section of the lot, because prohibitions travel further than encouragement. Rulings on the awkward cases: how you price in writing, how you say no, how you deliver bad news.
And then the prompt pack, written out separately for each tool, because they take instruction in different places. ChatGPT wants custom instructions or a project. Claude wants a project's custom instructions or a style. Copilot wants it in the file or the prompt. Gemini wants a gem. The wording that works in one is not automatically the wording that works in the next.
One honest caveat, because the alternative is selling you a permanent fix that does not exist. No prompt holds forever. Models get updated, people paste over the instructions, and every model pulls steadily back towards the middle. That is what the monthly options further down are for, and it is also why the specification is worth owning as a document rather than as a setting inside somebody else's product. Every Wordprint carries the Check free for its first ninety days: a drift monitor that scores your new drafts against your own Wordprint rather than a general standard, from the document's own page or from inside the tools themselves, and re-reads your published pages against it once a month without being asked, then £39 a month or £390 a year, bought from the document's page and nowhere else. How it works.
What you end up with: anybody on your team can open any of those four tools and get back a draft that sounds like your business, on the first attempt, without you in the loop.
Ways to start
Prices
The Soundalike, the self-serve Wordprint and the Desk Wordprint are priced exactly and paid by card when you order, and the Desk's delivery date is on the receipt. The interview versions start from the figure shown and are fixed in writing before anything begins. Either way the price quoted is the price: no VAT or sales tax is added. If a piece of work is not worth the money, you will be told before you spend it, which happens often enough to be worth putting on the page.
Two things set the prices apart, and neither is a packaging trick. The first is whether a person reads the evidence and rules on it: £395 is what the software produces on its own, and £950 is that plus the judgement about what it means, which is the only reason the three-things promise can exist. The second is whether anybody is asked what the business believes: everything up to £950 is built from published writing, and published writing is written to sell rather than to explain, so it shows habits reliably and convictions never. The interviews are the only place those come from, and it is the whole of the step up to £3,450.
The specification itself
Self-serve Wordprint
£395
Send a link, and the document arrives. The same measurements and the same structure, written end to end by software, with nobody ruling on it, which is why it costs less than half the Desk Wordprint. It will tell you accurately how you sound. It will not tell you which of your habits is worth keeping, so it does not carry the three-things promise. It carries a narrower one: if the tool cannot read what you send it, or the document arrives incomplete or wrong about your business, you get your money back. Read one in full.
Desk Wordprint
£950
Built from what you have already published, delivered by a date you see before you pay, five working days out. No interviews and nothing to prepare: send a link. Everything the self-serve version produces, the prompt pack included. What you are paying for beyond the £395 version is the ruling. Software can tell you that you hedge four times in ten thousand words. It cannot tell you that three of those are fine and the fourth undermines the only paragraph that mattered. A person reads your evidence and decides which habits are strengths, which are tics, and which sentence you keep trying to cut is the best one you have. That is what the three-things promise rests on.
When a website is not enough to go on
The Desk Wordprint is the one to buy: it carries the promise, and the self-serve version is for a business that already knows it wants the document without the ruling. Both of those are built from what you have already published. These two are not, because at this size the things that decide how a business sounds are not on its website.
- Wordprint, from £3,450. Everything in the Desk Wordprint, plus interviews, because published writing shows how a business sounds and never why it believes what it believes. It is also the version for a business with nothing much published yet: when there is no corpus to read, the interviews are not an upgrade, they are the whole of the evidence. The £1,850 team session is included rather than sold again afterwards: half a day with everybody who writes for you, putting the prompt pack into the tools you actually run and testing it on your own drafts, described in full under Installing it. Two weeks.
- Wordprint for an organisation, from £5,900. The corporate voice plus three speaking roles, with the register shift between them documented. That is what the price starts at: more roles is more evidence to read, so say how many and the number is fixed in writing before anything begins. Three weeks, including the team handover.
Ask about either and you get a price and a date, not a discovery call.
Not a Wordprint, and priced separately: the Soundalike, the Draft Clinic, the team session, the editor in residence, the portfolio report and Say It Once have a page of their own.