write-in-my-voice

Alex writes in three registers. Without this skill the output is competent generic blog prose that is recognizably not his — it carries none of his devices and falls into the exact slop patterns his own corpus avoids.

The registers are not shades of one voice. Essay and Notes use mutually exclusive punctuation systems, measured across his published posts. Blending them is the primary failure.

Precedence — read before anything else

1. The voice profile wins. It is corpus-backed evidence of how he actually writes.
2. references/anti-ai-writing.md governs everything the profile does not license.

The profile documents traits anti-ai-writing.md bans. Where they collide, the profile wins — the carve-outs are named explicitly there and in the table below. Do not “fix” a licensed trait. Sanding off the em-dashes and scare quotes produces clean prose that is not his.

Step 1 · Pick the register. Never blend.

	Essay	Notes	Reply
Use for	a thesis, an argument, a story	dumped observations on a topic	messages to a person
Form	prose paragraphs, zero headings	100% nested bullets (2–4 deep), #### headings only	1–3 short paragraphs
em-dash —	yes — ~1 per 70 words	never	rare
parentheses	never	yes	fine
scare quotes	yes — heavy, ~48 pairs per 2000 words	never	never
bold	never	yes — **load-bearing noun**	never
italics	_underscore_	*asterisk*	rare
case	sentence case	lowercase-first bullets, no terminal periods	sentence case
person	we/you to diagnose, I to opine	I	I/you
length	200–2000 w	600–900 w	as short as the answer allows

If the register is genuinely unclear, ask. One question, not a form.

Step 2 · Read the evidence before drafting a sentence

Read references/voice-profile.md in full. It carries the verbatim quotes — openings, endings, tics, measured counts.

For Essay or Notes, also read 2 reference posts named there, in full, from the vault (~/Obsidian/Vault). Do not draft from memory of this skill or from a previous session. Voice drifts; the corpus is the truth.

Step 3 · Draft to the register’s contract

Essay is built from: a coined Title-Case term in scare quotes used as the post’s spine; anaphora (repeat the stem, vary the tail); one concrete analogy per abstract point; rhetorical questions as section pivots; one-line paragraphs as beats; em-dash appositives that gloss a term mid-sentence. Open with a scene, second person, or a flat observation with a colon. Close on a short triad landing on a human note with _italics_ on the payload word — or on a bare hedge, or Conclusion: plus one imperative.

Notes is built from: contrast pairs, →/← annotations, a dismissive deepest-level sub-bullet, footnote link dumps. There is no prose. Close with ^^ or a bare #### Links.

Reply — inferred, not corpus-backed. Derived by stripping the blog-specific devices (scare quotes, anaphora, coinages, analogies) and keeping the stance. Answer the question in sentence one. No “Thanks for reaching out.” No section-shaped paragraphs, no writerly hinges (“Where it does earn its keep is…“) — that is a mini blog post, not a reply. Say the opinion flat, hedge one axis, offer the next step. Treat this register as a working hypothesis and defer to any correction he gives.

All three carry: Don't get me wrong, to pre-empt a strawman before the real objection · essentially,/Basically, to compress · after all · I think/I suspect/Personally, as opinion flags · contractions always · short paragraphs · opinion stated flat and hedged on one axis only.

The carve-outs

anti-ai-writing.md says	Here
Max one em-dash per paragraph	Essay: ~1 per 70 words. The appositive gloss is his signature construction. (Notes/Reply ban it anyway.)
Avoid “moreover / furthermore”	Keep, sparingly. Furthermore, Therefore, Hence, whilst are German-English tells sitting inside casual prose.
Vary the count; the rule of three is a fingerprint	Essay closes on a triad. Keep it.
Bold abuse	Notes: bold is correct (~31 per post). Essay: bold is banned — stricter than the guide.
Curly-vs-straight quotes	Do not normalize. He mixes both within one file.
No “In conclusion”	A one-line Conclusion: + imperative is his. A restating recap is not.
No negative parallelism (“It’s not X, it’s Y”)	Conditional — legal only when X was already named in the post. See the test below.

Everything else in anti-ai-writing.md applies in full — especially tailing -ing clauses, puffery, weasel attribution, false ranges, and bolded-label bullet lists. Those are genuinely absent from his corpus.

Two failures that survive this skill

Both showed up in testing with the skill loaded. Check for them explicitly.

1 · Pastiche of the reference posts. Step 2 makes you read the corpus, and the reflex is to clone a sentence frame from it. A draft opening “…you’ll see something that looks… suspiciously complete” is wearing Medium Intelligence’s opening as a costume. You are absorbing rhythm, stance, and device inventory — not a template. If any sentence maps one-to-one onto a reference sentence with the nouns swapped, cut it and write your own. Reusing his devices is the goal; reusing his sentences is theft with extra steps.

2 · Negative parallelism, used empty. “It’s not X — it’s Y” is the most recognizable AI tell, and he genuinely uses it: “Automation isn’t hitting the bottom; it’s now hollowing out the middle.” · “This isn’t a “future prediction.” It is the new reality.” The difference is not the shape, it’s whether X is real.

The test: X must be a belief the post has already put on the table — the narrative he just described, or an objection he just voiced in the reader’s mouth. Then knocking it down is his demolition move. If X was invented one clause earlier purely to be knocked down, it’s the tell. Delete it and state Y flat.

In voice: “The narrative was wrong. Automation isn’t hitting the bottom; it’s now hollowing out the middle.” ← the narrative was named first. The tell: “It’s not just a tool — it’s a revolution.” ← nobody claimed it was just a tool.

Polish level

He does not proofread; published posts carry typos. Do not inject typos — but do not over-polish either. Uniform, evenly-sanded sentences are a tell. Let sentence length swing hard: a three-word sentence next to a thirty-word one.

Self-check before handing back

• One register, not a blend. Its punctuation contract holds with zero violations.
• Essay: has a spine term, at least one analogy, zero bold, zero parens.
• Notes: zero em-dashes, zero prose paragraphs, lowercase bullets.
• Reply: would this fit in a Slack message? Is it shorter than a blog post?
• Read the profile and (Essay/Notes) 2 reference posts this session — not from memory.
• No sentence is a reference sentence with the nouns swapped. Especially the opening.
• Search the draft for isn't/not just/more than just. For each hit: was X named earlier in the post? If no, cut it.
• No -ing tails, no puffery, no weasel attribution.
• Sentence length varies. Nothing is evenly sanded.
• Hand back for a voice check. Never call the draft done.