Voice, and Why “Write Like You Talk” Is Useless Advice

“Just write like you talk.” It is the most common piece of writing advice given to founders, it sounds humane and permission-giving, and it is close to useless. Not wrong — useless, which is different. It describes the destination without naming a single step.

Two problems sink it immediately. You don't talk one way, and you can't hear yourself. You speak differently to a customer, an investor, your co-founder and a stranger at a conference — so “like you talk” doesn't specify anything. And the register you'd have to notice in order to reproduce it is precisely the thing that's invisible from inside your own head.

Ask a founder to describe their own voice and you get adjectives: direct, warm, no-nonsense. Every founder says roughly those three. They describe an aspiration, and you cannot write from an aspiration.

I wrote most of my several hundred posts under my own name rather than a company's, which means there was no brand guideline to hide behind. Whatever voice those posts had, I had to find it and then hold it, and holding it was always the harder half.

Mine arrived by accident. I changed companies, moved from being in a team to leading one, and ended up running a rebrand where I argued for a more casual voice than the organisation had been using. Having won that argument I had to write in it — and the thing that surprised me wasn't that the posts got better to read. It's that they got better to write. Writing in a voice that was actually mine stopped feeling like a chore. I've never gone back, and I'd now say that's the real test: if writing in your voice is still unpleasant, it probably isn't yours yet.

So it's worth taking voice apart into things you can actually work with.

Register: how you're pitched

How formal, how warm, how certain, how much you assume the reader already knows. This is the layer people usually mean by “tone,” and it's the least interesting of the four, because it's the easiest to imitate and the least distinguishing. Plenty of people write with the same register as you.

The useful thing about register is that it should shift with the audience and stay consistent within a piece. Most voice failures at this layer are drift — a post that opens conversationally and ends in the language of a press release, because you got self-conscious halfway through.

Vantage: where you're standing when you speak

This is the biggest lever in voice and almost nobody names it.

Take one sentence — small companies don't fail at marketing for lack of budget — and change only where the speaker is standing:

1. “I run this company, and here's what I've found.” Authority from position. Direct, first-person, stakes visible.
2. “I've watched this happen to twenty companies.” Authority from pattern. Cooler, more observational, generalising.
3. “A customer said something last week that reframed this for me.” Authority borrowed and attributed. Warmer, specific, and it puts someone else at the centre.
4. “Here's the mechanism, and it's not obvious.” Authority from understanding. Explanatory, technical, less personal.

Same claim, same person, four genuinely different posts. The vantage decides what evidence you're allowed to use and what you have to explain, which is why they diverge rather than merely sounding different.

One thing to be strict about: a vantage is not a different speaker. On your profile the author is always you. A customer-vantage post centres what the customer experienced, told in your voice. It does not write in their voice, and it does not invent their words. That distinction matters more than it sounds, and it comes back in the next post.

Vantage is also the practical answer to the sameness problem in the previous post. Four vantages against five angles is twenty combinations, which is more than a quarter needs.

Signature phrasing: the words you actually reuse

Everybody has constructions they return to. A particular way of conceding a point before disagreeing. A word they use where most people would use a more common one. A rhythm — short sentence after a long one, or the opposite. A habit of asking the reader a question and then answering it.

These are not stylistic choices you made. They're residue, and they're what makes writing recognisable as yours before anyone reaches the byline.

You cannot list them from memory, which is the whole difficulty. The only way to get at them is to go and look: pull together everything you've written that sounded like you — sales emails, long replies to customers, old posts you liked, a transcript of you explaining your company to someone — and read it for the repetitions. Not for the ideas. For the constructions that keep appearing.

It's an odd exercise and mildly uncomfortable, and it produces the only version of “your voice” that's usable. A description of a voice is not a voice. A list of your actual recurring constructions is.

Refusals: what you'd never say

The layer nobody documents, and often the most distinguishing of the four.

Voice is as much what you decline as what you do. Some people won't use exclamation marks. Some won't call anything a game-changer. Some won't open with a question, or won't use the word “journey,” or won't claim a result they can't attribute.

Most voice failures are additions rather than omissions. A post stops sounding like you not because something was left out, but because something was put in that you would never have written — a superlative, a piece of jargon, a hook you'd have been embarrassed by in conversation. Nobody has a list of these. Everybody recognises the violation instantly when they read it.

Why voice erodes even when you know all this

Here's the part the advice never covers.

You can write in your voice. The difficulty is writing in it consistently across fifty posts, produced over six months, in wildly different states — the week after a good sales call and the week you nearly lost a customer, on a Monday morning with time and on a Thursday night with none.

Voice degrades under pressure in a specific and predictable direction: toward the generic. Under time pressure you reach for the nearest available phrasing, and the nearest available phrasing is whatever the market says most often. That's why the fiftieth post so often sounds like the industry and the fifth sounded like a person. Nobody decided to change. The default reasserted itself every time attention ran low.

Which means voice is not a thing you establish. It's a thing you maintain, against a constant drift, for as long as you publish.

Where we've got to, honestly

I'm building a system to do this, so it's fair to say where it currently stands.

It writes more cleanly than I do, and far more consistently. Structure, continuity, the discipline of not wandering — it's better at all of that than I am on a Thursday night. And it still doesn't sound like me. It sounds like a good copywriter, which is a real compliment and the wrong target, because a good copywriter is exactly the thing a reader can't distinguish from every other good copywriter.

That gap is the hard part of this problem and we haven't closed it. I'd rather say so in the middle of a post about voice than let you find out on your own, and it's the reason the last section of this series is careful about what's built and what isn't.

What holding a voice steady involves

1. Gathering a real sample of your own writing and reading it for recurring constructions. Extracting your tone, rather than describing it.
2. Writing down the refusals: the words, claims and formats you won't use.
3. Choosing a vantage deliberately per post, rather than defaulting to first-person-founder every time.
4. Checking each draft against the sample rather than against your intention — your intention is always “sounds like me,” which is never a reliable check.
5. Re-doing the extraction periodically, because your voice moves as the company does.

The uncomfortable part is item four. Checking a draft against how you actually write, rather than against how you meant it to sound, requires having the sample to hand and the willingness to find that a paragraph you like isn't yours.

Which is a good moment to get concrete. There's a specific, recognisable set of ways writing announces that no person wrote it, and they're easier to see on the page than in the abstract.