How to Write in a Voice That Actually Sounds Like You

Read enough brand copy and it all begins to blur. The same confident adjectives, the same tidy promises, the same faint whiff of a committee that met on a Tuesday. You could swap the logos and nobody would notice. That is the trouble with most brand voices. They do not sound like anyone at all.

A real voice is the thing that makes a reader feel there is a human on the other end of the page. It is worth more than any clever campaign, because it travels through everything you write, from the homepage to the out-of-office. So how do you find yours, and then keep hold of it?

Find your natural voice

Start by listening to how you actually talk. Record yourself explaining what you do to a friend, then read your website out loud straight afterwards. The gap between the two is usually enormous. The spoken version is warm, specific, and human. The written version has stiffened into corporate posture, all shoulders and no smile. Your true voice is nearly always closer to the way you speak than the way you currently write.

Next, decide on a few words that describe how you want to come across, and a few that describe how you do not. Warm, not gushing. Confident, not arrogant. Playful, not silly. These pairs are far more useful than a page of adjectives, because they draw a line. They tell a writer, and later a whole team, exactly where the edge is and when they have gone over it.

Write for one person

Then, write towards one person. Not a market, not a segment, a single reader you can actually picture. Use “you”. Ask the odd question. Leave in the small human touches a nervous brand would edit out, the aside, the bit of dry humour, the honest admission. Those are the parts people remember and quote back to you.

It helps to name the traps you personally fall into, as well. Some of us go stiff and formal the moment there is a logo at the top of the page. Others hide every real opinion behind a passive sentence so nobody can possibly disagree. Once you can see your own habit, you can catch it in a draft and write your way back out of it, towards the person a friend would recognise.

Formalise your voice

The final step is the hardest and the most important. Write it down. A voice that lives only in the founder’s head cannot survive the moment someone else picks up the pen, and someone else always does eventually. A simple tone-of-voice guide, with real examples of good and bad side by side, is what lets a team of five sound like one person. Examples do far more than adjectives here. Show the sentence you would proudly write and the sentence you would never write, and the rule explains itself.

Get this right and everything else gets easier. Your content becomes recognisable before anyone reaches the logo. People feel they know you, which is the first quiet step towards trusting you. And the writing itself speeds up, because you are no longer deciding who to be every single time you start a draft.

If your copy could belong to anyone, it is time to make it unmistakably yours. That is one of our favourite things to help a brand do, and it is usually quicker than people fear.