SortedEA Executive voice
Use this skill when an assistant wants to capture how their principal writes, is drafting in someone else's name, says drafts do not sound like the person signing them, or asks how to learn an executive's voice. Phrases that mean this skill: "capture his voice", "learn her writing style", "build a voice profile", "this doesn't sound like him", "write as my CEO", "match my principal's tone".
Most voice-capture methods interview the writer about themselves. That does not work here, for two reasons. Your principal will not sit through an interview about their punctuation. And people describe their own writing badly. They tell you they are direct, and then you read 40 of their emails and find they open every difficult one with two sentences of throat-clearing.
So this runs the other way. The corpus is the source of truth. You are the source of context. Read what they actually wrote, measure it, then answer a short set of questions about the things writing cannot reveal.
Budget about 90 minutes. Most of it is reading.
Step 1. Gather the corpus
Aim for 25 to 40 pieces. More is better, recent is better, and range matters more than volume.
Evidence is not equal. Weight it:
| Source | Weight | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Emails they wrote themselves, sent | Highest | Unedited, unperformed, the real thing |
| Their edits to your drafts | Highest | Every change is a preference, stated in the clearest way you will ever get |
| Handwritten notes, messages, Slack | High | Fast writing shows defaults |
| Interview and podcast transcripts | High | Their vocabulary and sentence shapes, though speech runs looser than writing |
| Talks and presentations they wrote | Medium | Prepared, so more considered than they normally are |
Leave out anything that passed through someone else. LinkedIn posts, press quotes, official statements, bylined articles and award submissions are frequently written or heavily edited by comms teams, agencies and PR. Feed those into a voice profile and you capture an agency house style and label it your principal. You usually cannot tell by reading, which is why the rule is exclusion rather than caution. You have better sources.
If your principal genuinely writes their own posts and you want to work on their presence, that is a separate job with separate rules. See the linkedin-ghostwriting skill.
Get range across four axes, because executives write very differently along each: internal against external, to seniors against to their own team, good news against bad, and considered against fired off from a phone. A corpus of 30 friendly internal emails teaches you nothing about how they decline.
Step 2. Tell them you are doing it
Say it plainly: "I'm putting together notes on how you write, so that anything I draft for you sounds like you rather than like me. Can I use your sent folder, and would you tell me the things you'd never say?"
Two reasons this is not optional. Building a model of how someone writes, from their private correspondence, without telling them, is not a thing to do quietly. And practically, they will improve it in five minutes: they know their own tics and their own hard nos, and they can tell you which LinkedIn posts are theirs.
Step 3. Measure the corpus
Work through references/extraction-checklist.md. It is a list of things to count and collect, not things to sense.
The point of counting is that impressions are wrong. You will believe they write short sentences and find the mean is 24 words. You will believe they are warm and find they open 8 emails in a row with the recipient's name and nothing else.
Collect verbatim examples as you go. A profile with 20 real sentences in it is worth more than one with 20 adjectives.
Negative evidence is the strongest kind. If they have not used a single exclamation mark in 40 emails, that is a harder rule than anything they could tell you. Note what is absent, not only what is present.
Step 4. Fill the gaps
Now ask the questions in references/gap-questions.md. There are about 20, and every one is about something the corpus cannot show: what they refuse to put in writing at all, who they adjust for, what they have told you to stop doing, the tell that means they are annoyed.
Ask the principal what you can. Answer the rest yourself, from observation, and mark which is which.
Step 5. Write the profile
Use assets/voice-profile-template.md.
Two rules for what goes in it:
Every claim carries evidence or a source. "Prefers short sentences" is useless. "Mean 14 words in internal email, 22 in board papers, from 31 samples" can be acted on. Where a rule comes from observation rather than the corpus, say so.
Label the strength of each rule, because a profile applied uniformly produces parody:
- Hard rule. Never violate. Rare. Usually a hard no, or something absent across the whole corpus.
- Strong tendency. Do it most of the time. The bulk of the profile.
- Light preference. Context decides.
Unlabelled means light preference.
Step 6. Test it before you trust it
The mixed sample test. Write 3 short pieces in their voice. Mix them with 3 real ones. Show a colleague who knows the principal well and ask which are real. If they pick your drafts out immediately, the profile is not finished. Ask what gave it away, because that answer is the missing rule.
The edit test, better and slower. Send them a draft. Watch what they change. If they only change facts and content, the voice works. If they rewrite phrasing, every rewrite is a rule you missed. Log it.
Keep logging edits after the profile is done. Corrections are the highest quality evidence there is, and they arrive free, forever.
Step 7. Save it as a skill
A profile sitting in a folder gets read once. A profile installed as a skill gets used every time anyone drafts in that person's name, which is the point of building it.
The save-as-skill skill in this repository does this end to end — it asks for the name, strips what should not be packaged, builds the folder and hands back a zip. Use it if you have it installed.
references/save-as-a-skill.md covers the same ground by hand, and goes further on the parts specific to a voice profile: what to put in the instructions against what to leave in the reference files, the naming convention when you support more than one principal, how to package and install it, and how to keep it current.
Read the privacy section of that file before you package anything. A voice skill is a file about a named real person, built from their correspondence. It is not shareable material, and it must never reach a public repository or an organisation-wide skill directory.
Privacy
You are building this from someone's private correspondence, and it describes a real person.
- Record how they write, not what they wrote about. The profile needs sentence shapes and vocabulary. It does not need the deal, the figure or the disagreement.
- Strip extracted samples. Replace names, sums, clients and specifics with placeholders before a line goes into the profile. "Can you get me the [figure] before [day]?" carries the voice and nothing else.
- Nothing confidential travels into the profile, however illustrative. If a sentence is only good because of what it discloses, leave it out.
- Store it where you store other material about your principal, not in a personal account.
- On handover, hand it over deliberately. It is a working document about a named person, not a file to email around.
Do not overcorrect
A voice profile describes tendencies. It is not a costume.
Do not force every signature pattern into every draft. Do not open the same way each time because they have a common opener. Do not avoid a word forever because it is rare in the corpus, when it is the right word. Content decides structure, not the template.
The test before anything goes out: does this read like something they would write, or like a careful imitation of them? If it feels forced, use fewer of the patterns, not more.
And keep this separate from accuracy. Matching their voice never justifies changing a fact, softening a decline, or committing them to something they did not say.