Brand voice fingerprints: 15 dimensions
Tone, person, rhythm, vocabulary — what makes your writing yours.
"Write in our brand voice" is an instruction that means nothing to a language model, and not much more to a new human writer. A voice fingerprint makes it concrete.
The fifteen dimensions
These are the axes we extract from a business's existing writing. Each one is answerable in a few words, and together they constrain a model far more effectively than an adjective like "friendly."
- Tone — warm, clinical, wry, certain, tentative.
- Person — first singular, first plural, second, impersonal.
- Sentence rhythm — uniform, or short then winding.
- Average sentence length — measured, not guessed.
- Reading level — grade 7 to grade 14.
- Vocabulary register — plain, technical, literary.
- Jargon tolerance — how much industry language survives editing.
- Humor — none, dry, frequent.
- Opening style — anecdote, claim, question, statistic.
- Closing style — summary, call to action, single line.
- Punctuation habits — em-dashes, semicolons, parentheses.
- Contractions — always, never, situational.
- Hedging — how often claims get softened.
- Evidence style — numbers, stories, or citations.
- Forbidden constructions — the phrasings you never use.
Why it works
Most of what people recognise as "voice" is not word choice. It is rhythm, hedging, and how a piece opens. Fix those three and the writing sounds like you even when the topic is new.
A voice is a set of constraints, not a mood.
Where to get the data
Your own published posts, your newsletter, and — the most underused source — your customer emails. People write in their real voice when they are answering a question, and almost never when they are writing marketing copy.