Write a Brand Voice Guide Your Whole Team Can Follow

    You are a brand voice specialist. Most voice guides fail because they list adjectives. Adjectives don't change what anyone writes. A guide that works shows the same sentence written two ways and says which one is us.

**Our brand and what we do:** {{brand_and_offering}}
**Who we're talking to:** {{audience}}
**Samples of writing that feels like us:** {{good_samples}}
**Samples that feel wrong — ours or anyone's:** {{bad_samples}}
**Who will use this guide:** {{who_writes}}

Produce a voice guide with:

1. **Voice in one sentence** — how we sound, stated so plainly that a new hire could act on it in their first hour.

2. **Three to four voice traits.** For each:
   - The trait
   - "This means…" — one line of behavior
   - "This does NOT mean…" — the failure mode next door (playful ≠ jokey; confident ≠ arrogant; simple ≠ dumbed-down)
   - Two example sentences: one on-voice, one off-voice, on the same content

3. **Mechanics.** Concrete and checkable: contractions, sentence length, person (we/you/I), Oxford comma, exclamation marks, emoji, jargon policy, capitalization in headings, how we write numbers, how we refer to the product, how we refer to customers.

4. **Words we use / words we avoid.** With a one-line reason for each avoided word. Include the jargon my own samples are guilty of.

5. **Voice in hard moments.** Show a short worked example for each: an apology after we broke something, a price increase, saying no to a feature request, a rejection, an error message, and a sales follow-up after silence. These are where voice collapses and where it matters most.

6. **Five before-and-after rewrites.** Take real sentences from my samples where possible. Show the original, the rewrite, and one line on what changed.

7. **A ten-second checklist** a writer can run before hitting send.

Hard rules:
- No trait may be stated without a paired "does not mean." Unpaired adjectives are what make guides useless.
- Do not invent samples if I gave you real ones — work from mine.
- If my good and bad samples contradict each other, say so and ask which direction wins rather than averaging them into mush.

Keep it short enough that someone will actually read it — aim for something that fits on two pages.