AI Style Guide Builder
Build a style guide you can use as a system prompt to keep all AI outputs on-brand.
If you use AI to help write content, the quality depends on how well AI understands your brand voice. This workflow helps you articulate your voice in specific, actionable terms that you can embed in any AI system prompt.
The Workflow
Complete the voice interview
Answer eight specific questions about how you write. Specificity is everything — 'conversational' tells AI almost nothing.
I'm going to answer eight questions to help define my writing voice. Please ask them one at a time and wait for my answers before asking the next. Starting question 1: What's your default sentence length preference? (Short and punchy / medium and measured / long and layered — and give me a sentence that exemplifies it.) After I answer all eight questions, synthesize my answers into a style guide and a system prompt I can use with AI tools. The eight questions are: 1. Sentence length preference with example 2. What words or phrases do you actively avoid? 3. How do you handle jargon? (embrace it / translate it / avoid it) 4. What's your relationship with humor? (never / occasional dry wit / frequent / central to voice) 5. How formal is your punctuation and grammar style? 6. Give me an example of someone else's writing you wish you'd written 7. What does writing you'd be embarrassed by sound like? 8. In one sentence: who is your ideal reader?
Build the style guide document
After the voice interview, generate the full style guide.
Based on my voice interview answers: [VOICE_INTERVIEW_ANSWERS] Build a complete style guide with these sections: 1. Voice in one paragraph (the essence of how I write) 2. Tone calibration (how my voice adjusts for different contexts) 3. Sentence and paragraph rules 4. Words and phrases to use 5. Words and phrases to avoid 6. How I handle: technical terms / statistics / humor / storytelling 7. Three example paragraphs demonstrating my voice (in different content types) 8. A system prompt (under 200 words) I can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI tool The system prompt should be concrete enough that an AI produces noticeably different output with it than without it.
Replace: [VOICE_INTERVIEW_ANSWERS]
All Prompts for This Workflow
Based on my voice interview answers: [VOICE_INTERVIEW_ANSWERS] Build a style guide with: voice summary paragraph, tone calibration, sentence/paragraph rules, words to use/avoid, handling of technical terms and humor, three example paragraphs in different content types, and a system prompt under 200 words that produces noticeably on-brand AI output.
Replace: [VOICE_INTERVIEW_ANSWERS]
I have an established brand voice. Here is my style guide: [STYLE_GUIDE] Now review this piece of writing I created: [WRITING_SAMPLE] For every sentence or passage that deviates from my style guide: 1. Quote it 2. Explain what rule it breaks 3. Rewrite it to match my voice Give me a final consistency score (1-10) and the top two patterns I should watch for.
Replace: [STYLE_GUIDE], [WRITING_SAMPLE]
A complete brand style guide with specific rules, word lists, and example paragraphs — plus a concise system prompt you can paste into any AI tool to get consistently on-brand output.
- →Test the system prompt by generating the same piece of content with and without it. The difference shows you exactly what the style guide is contributing.
- →Update the style guide every six months. Voice evolves, and a stale style guide is worse than no style guide.