When I wrote the voice spec for my blog automation, I went deep. Opener patterns, closer patterns, banned phrases, the sentence rhythm I use when pivoting from enthusiasm to a genuine caveat. I cross-checked it against my own posts. Iterated on it. It’s 90 lines and it does its job.
The spec tells the system how to sound like me. How to open without starting with “Today I” or “Have you ever wondered.” How to close without a summary bullet list. When to use a fragment for emphasis. The hard no-em-dash rule. I thought that was the complete picture.
Then in June I sat down to review a batch of twelve drafts.
Three of them mentioned my employer by name. Not dramatically, just in passing, the kind of reference that would show up in any work conversation I have in a week but that I’d never put on a public website I also link from my LinkedIn profile. The automation didn’t know those references were off-limits. There’s no rule in the voice spec that says so. I never wrote one because you don’t write down what goes without saying.
Two posts named my daughter. In passing, as texture, the kind of detail that makes a post feel human rather than generated. Also the kind of detail I’d never attach to a permanent URL on a professional portfolio.
So I added a checklist. Four items. readTime field present. No employer name. No family member names. Inline links on first mentions of tools and platforms.
The voice spec took real work to get right because the voice is a hard thing to hand to a system. You have to show it examples, test the rhythm, explain how to pivot and how to close. Legitimate specification work. The checklist took three minutes, because every item was something I already knew. I just hadn’t thought to say it out loud.
If you handed me a blank document and asked me to describe my blog voice, I’d produce something like the spec. If you asked “what would you never publish,” I’d probably look at you a little funny. Because the answer felt obvious. To me.
That’s the problem with giving a system your context. You hand it everything you’ve documented. The things you just know, you never document. And the things you just know are often the ones that cost you when they surface in a draft. Not wrong in a technical sense. Wrong in the “I’d never say that in public” sense. The kind of wrong that doesn’t surface until you’re reading a post and you see your kid’s name on a site with your professional profile two links away.
The voice spec handles how. The checklist handles what’s off the record. Both documents matter. The voice spec was the hard one. The checklist was almost too easy.
Start with the voice spec. Then write the second document, the one where you answer “what would I never publish.” Write that one too. It won’t take long. That’s the point.