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.
A Wordprint is that voice, written down and made usable by all three.
Fifteen to twenty-five pages. 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 an interview, from an hour 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
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, 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 the average of the internet.
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 interview, 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 the average of the internet exerts a steady pull 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 a free first year of the Check, the drift monitor, whenever that is finished.
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
Indicative, and fixed in writing before anything begins. No VAT: not registered. 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 makes the calls, which is what the three-things promise rests on and why the automated version cannot carry it. The second is the interview. Six subjects showed the same thing every time: published writing gives you rhythm, habits and prohibitions reliably, and it cannot give you convictions, because a website is written to sell rather than to explain. If you want the version that is genuinely hard to copy, that comes out of an hour of awkward questions.
The specification itself
Desk Wordprint Live
£950
Built from what you have already published, back in five working days. No interview and nothing to prepare. Everything above, plus the prompt pack and a call to hand it over. Three things you did not know, or you do not pay.
Wordprint Live
From £3,450
Adds the interview and the install, meaning the £1,850 team session is included rather than sold again. This is the version with convictions in it, and convictions are what make writing impossible to copy. Two weeks.
Wordprint, organisation Live
From £5,900
The corporate voice plus up to three speaking roles, with the register shift between them documented. Three weeks, including the team handover.
Self-serve Wordprint In private beta
£395
The same pipeline, automated end to end, which is why it costs less than half the Desk Wordprint and does not carry the three-things promise. In beta, which means a person still reads every document before it sends. Ask for a place.
Not a Wordprint, and cheaper for it
Soundalike Live
£95
You against up to three named rivals, scored by the same code on the same day, with the shared phrasebook set out phrase by phrase. Back inside two working days. Answers "why can nobody tell us apart from them", and stops there. How the score works.
Draft Clinic Live
£195
Ninety minutes on one piece you are stuck on, worked through together on a call. The only rung here with a person on the other end of it. Book directly; no enquiry, no call about the call.
Nothing in the calendar that suits? Send two or three times that do and one gets opened.
Editor in residence Live
From £750 a month
Everything you publish gets read and marked up before it goes out. Rolling, thirty days' notice.