Making Claude Sound More Like Me

So everyone says that if you’re going to have an AI draft content for you, first you should create a writing-rules.md document and load it up with all of your specific writing preferences and quirks.

You know, something like:

• 3-5 sentence paragraphs
• Avoid these 5 common AI “tells”
• Never passive voice

etc etc.

But what if you’ve never really analyzed your writing to actually write it down in black and white? That’s me. I write like I write but I can’t tell you (or Claude) what that means.

One Common Workaround (That Didn’t Work for Me)

OK, they say. So just give it a stack of your recent blog writing and let it draft the writing rules doc for you.

Great, if you have a stack of writing you can feed it. I don’t. My last blog has long since gone to the great wastebin in the sky, and honestly I haven’t been writing much more than tweets lately.

What I Ended Up Doing — This Could Work for You Too

So I had a super rough concept in my head for what I wanted to communicate. I jotted down about 4 sentences and maybe 10 bullet points and had Claude take a swing at a draft.

It wasn’t great. Sounded like AI from start to finish. But the content was there and he (yeah I call it he) added a couple of useful insights.

So I edited it — heavily. The overall structure was fine, but the voice was WAAAY off. Fixed it. Cut out a bunch of overly-repetitive bits where the point had already been made adequately. Tightened up the prose. Just made it sound way more like me.

Then, and here’s the key bit: I told Claude to compare his version with mine and record any learnings.

And. It. Worked.

Here’s why it works: the gap between what Claude wrote and what you changed it to is your style — made visible. You can’t always articulate your instincts upfront, but you can absolutely act on them when something’s wrong.

Every sentence you rewrote was an implicit rule. Every word you cut was a preference. Claude just needed to read the diff.

He pulled out several VERY helpful writing rules to be applied going forward, just by analyzing the before and after drafts. Including:

• trust the reader
• cut over-explained implications
• no editorializing about notable facts
• callback structure

Conclusion

Fairly confident that if we go a couple more rounds of this I’ll have the writing-rules.md that we need, but that I didn’t know how to craft myself.

Give it a try!

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Steve Reaser helps small businesses put AI to work. He writes about what’s actually working, and what isn’t. Watch me learn and build in public at SteveReaser.com