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Recipe: Docs voice & style guide writer

Generate a consistent voice-and-tone guide from your existing documentation corpus.

Ingredients

  • 5–20 Markdown doc pages (README, API refs, tutorials)
  • 1 product brief or mission statement
  • 3 competitor docs URLs (optional, for differentiation)

Steps

  1. Corpus ingest. Feed all Markdown files into the prompt. Strip frontmatter, preserve headings and code blocks.
  2. Pattern extraction. Identify recurring sentence structures, terminology choices, punctuation habits, and address patterns (second-person vs passive).
  3. Tone calibration. Map findings onto a formality axis (casual → academic) and an enthusiasm axis (dry → energetic).
  4. Differentiation. Compare against competitor docs to surface what makes your voice distinct.
  5. Guide generation. Output a structured guide with: voice summary, do/don't tables, word-choice glossary, and 3 annotated before/after examples.

Prompt template

You are a technical-writing voice analyst.
Given the following documentation corpus,
extract a consistent voice-and-style guide.

Corpus:
---
<PASTE DOCS HERE>
---

Product brief:
---
<PASTE BRIEF HERE>
---

Output a guide with these sections:
1. Voice summary (3 sentences max)
2. Do / Don't table (10 rows)
3. Word-choice glossary (15 entries)
4. 3 before/after rewrites with annotations

Pro tips

  • Run on a single writer's docs first for a cleaner signal.
  • Feed the output guide back into future doc-generation prompts as a system preamble.
  • Re-run quarterly as your team and product evolve.