Your AI drafts sound like everyone's because the assistant has nothing of yours to work from. It hasn't read your best posts, doesn't know which opinions you hold and has no list of facts you're allowed to use, so it fills each gap with the most average sentence available.
A source and style pack fixes that. It's 5 documents you set up once: annotated writing samples, a voice brief, an approved-facts register, a drafting prompt and a review scorecard. This guide builds all 5 for an example business, tests the pack on 3 drafts, and repairs what the test exposes.
It's part 2 of a 5-part series. Ridgeline Ops and its owner, Maya Okafor, are illustrative and invented for the series; part 1, building your own AI content engine, set up her content board and source folder.
Jump to the free AI Voice and Source Pack
Choose writing samples and evidence for AI writing in your voice
AI writing in your voice depends on 2 inputs: samples that show how you write, and evidence that shows what you're allowed to claim. Pick 5 pieces you wrote yourself for the same buyer, note what each one teaches, and keep a separate list of facts you can stand behind. Style without facts still produces confident fiction.
Pick 5 samples, including 1 to avoid
Choose pieces that meet these tests:
- Written by you, with light editing at most
- Aimed at the buyer you want now, which may rule out older work
- Mixed in shape (a scene, a claim, a tip), so the assistant sees your voice beyond 1 template
- 1 weak piece, labeled as a counterexample
Maya runs an operations consultancy for 20-to-80-person distribution companies, and her buyers are operations directors and owners. Here are her 5 samples, with the note she wrote beside each.
| Sample | Opening or key line | What it teaches | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| P-1, post | "The pick ticket said 40. The customer ordered 4 cases of 10." | Opens on a physical document; the numbers carry the joke | Her best opener, copy the move |
| P-2, post | "Each handoff already has an owner. Usually it's whoever answers the phone." | A plain claim, then a dry turn | Runs long in the middle |
| P-3, post | "Half the fields on your order form exist because of 1 bad week in 2019." | Humor through precision | Closes with a question to the audience |
| P-4, post | "Operational excellence is a journey, and alignment between departments is key." | Counterexample: abstract nouns, no scene, no number | Never copy this one |
| P-5, post | "Quick one before Friday: if your 2 p.m. change requests still go by email, print them for a week and count." | A direct instruction with a test the reader can run | Suits a quick tip; too casual to open a story |
Annotate in plain words. "Opens on a physical document" gives an assistant something to do, and "authentic and engaging" gives it nothing.
Collect evidence you can use
Evidence earns a place in the pack when you can point to where it came from and you're allowed to use it. Maya's qualifying sources are her anonymized client notes (N-1 onward), her 30-minute interview transcript and her own bio.
Leave out figures you remember but can't find in a note, results a client hasn't agreed to share, and anything that would identify a company. If a number lives only in your head, find the note first, or let the claim go.
Build a reusable voice brief and source register
A voice brief turns the sample notes into rules an assistant can follow, and the source register ties every usable fact to its origin. Keep each to about a page. Long style guides get skimmed by people and watered down by assistants, so write only rules you'd notice being broken in a draft.
The voice brief
The stance line comes from your positioning. If you can't write it in 1 sentence, start with the AuthorityOS guide to personal brand content strategy and come back.
VOICE BRIEF: Maya Okafor, Ridgeline Ops
Reader: operations directors and owners at distribution companies with
20 to 80 staff
Stance: the process causes most handoff failures; people follow the
process they're given
Openings: start on a physical object or a time of day (a pick ticket,
a 10:40 call, the 2 p.m. truck)
Sentences: mostly 8 to 16 words, with 1 very short line per piece
Words I use: handoff, promise date, pick ticket, dock, cutoff, shift
lead, mis-pick
Words I avoid: alignment, journey, excellence, stakeholders, pain
points, best-in-class
Numbers: only from the facts register, described the way it says
Humor: dry and specific, once per piece at most
Endings: 1 next step, stated plainly
The approved-facts register
Each row is a fact in the exact wording you'll stand behind, its source and its limits. All figures are invented for this example.
| ID | Approved wording | Source | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| F-1 | At a 38-person fastener distributor, 11 of 26 late orders in March were rush orders promised before the warehouse saw them. | N-3 | Anonymized; never pair the industry with a city |
| F-2 | In the order forms I've audited, most carry 15 or more fields, and the warehouse uses about 7. | N-12, an audit of 9 clients' forms | Say "in the forms I've audited" |
| F-3 | Moving the change cutoff from 2 p.m. to noon cut mis-picks from 14 to 5 a month at a 55-person food-service supplier. | N-7 | 1 site, the quarter after the change; client agreed to anonymized use |
| F-4 | The 7 fields the warehouse uses: customer, ship-to, items and quantities, promise date, who promised it, carrier, special handling. | N-12 | None |
| F-5 | Before Ridgeline Ops, Maya ran a 140,000-square-foot distribution center. | Bio | None |
| F-6 | Opinion: most late orders start with the handoff design, and reps follow the process they're given. | Interview 6:10 to 8:45 | Present as her view |
The drafting prompt
Store the brief, the register and the 5 samples where your assistant can reuse them. Claude's projects hold uploaded documents plus project instructions, Gemini's Gems take instructions and files under Knowledge, and ChatGPT offers Projects too. A pinned document you paste from works just as well.
You're drafting for [your name] of [your business]. Use the attached
voice brief, facts register and 5 samples. [Sample ID, P-4 for Maya]
is a counterexample; never write like it.
Task: draft the piece described in the source brief below.
Rules:
1. Every fact must come from the register. Tag it with its ID, like [F-2].
2. If the piece needs a fact the register lacks, write
[NEED FACT: what's missing] and keep going.
3. Follow the voice brief for openings, sentence length, words and endings.
4. Present opinions as my view, in the register's wording.
5. After the draft, list any rule you found hard to follow.
Source brief:
[paste the brief]
Rule 2 does the heavy lifting. An assistant asked to fill a gap will usually fill it, while one given a placeholder tends to use the placeholder, and you can see exactly where the evidence ran out.
The review scorecard
Score each draft 0, 1 or 2 on 6 checks, for a total out of 12.
| Check | 0 | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Facts | Any untagged or invented fact | All tagged, 1 wording drift | Each fact matches the register |
| Opening | Abstract statement or question | Concrete but generic | Physical object or time of day from the sources |
| Words | 2 or more avoided words | 1 avoided word | None |
| Stance | Blames people | Neutral | Process-first, in Maya's terms |
| Rhythm | Uniformly long sentences | Some variation | Mostly 8 to 16 words with 1 short line |
| Next step | Missing or a question | Present but vague | Matches the brief word for word |
Maya approves at 10 or more, and Facts must score 2 whatever the total.
Test the pack and correct the weak parts
Testing the pack means running it on 3 briefs you've already written, scoring each draft, and fixing the pack wherever a problem traces back to it. Maya used RL-2, RL-3 and RL-4 from her board, in that order, fixing the pack between drafts. RL-2 gets the full before-and-after below, and all 3 fed the fixes that follow.
RL-2: example draft beside Maya's revision
RL-2 answers "What should a sales-to-warehouse order form contain?" The left column is an illustrative example draft, written for this article to show common failures; no specific tool or model produced it.
| Example draft, version 1 | Scorecard problem | Maya's revision, version 2 | Fact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is your order form helping alignment between sales and operations, or hurting it? | Opening 0: a question. Words 1: "alignment" | Count the fields on your order form. Then count the ones the warehouse reads. | None needed |
| Most companies use forms with 20 or more fields. | Facts 0: the number differs from the register | In the order forms I've audited, most carry 15 or more fields, and the warehouse uses about 7. | F-2 |
| Simplifying your form reduces errors. [NEED FACT: error reduction from shorter forms] | The flag worked; there's no figure to use | Cut the form to the 7 the dock uses, and make the promise date and the name of whoever promised it required. | F-4 |
| Want to improve your handoffs? Let me know in the comments! | Next step 0 | Reply "form" and I'll send you the 7-field template. | Brief |
Version 1 scored 4 out of 12. Version 2 scored 11, losing a point on rhythm where 2 sentences ran past 20 words. Maya approved it after 50 minutes of editing; with the opening rule added, RL-3 needed 25.
What the test exposed, and the fix for each
| Problem | Seen in | Fix to the pack |
|---|---|---|
| Draft opened with a question | RL-2 | Voice brief now says openings are never a question |
| Draft called a 2-year-old change "recent" | RL-3 | Register gains a "When" column, so each fact carries its date |
| P-4 phrasing leaked into a draft | RL-4 | Counterexample moved out of the samples file and into the voice brief as a labeled line to avoid |
| 3 [NEED FACT] flags in 1 draft | RL-4 | Brief sent back to Idea, because note N-15 has no figures yet |
The last row is the pack working as designed. A draft full of flags shows the source material is thin, which hands the job back to you as research. Maya edited RL-4 through 2 more versions and 70 minutes before she accepted that, so send a flagged brief back at version 1.
Re-score after each fix. When 3 drafts in a row reach 10 or more with Facts at 2, the pack is ready for weekly use.
The AI Voice and Source Pack has Maya's completed versions of all 5 parts and blank copies for yours.
Build your pack this week: pick 5 samples, write the voice brief and register, then run the drafting prompt on 3 briefs from your board and score them. Fix every gap the scores trace to the pack before you draft anything new, and then part 3, turning 1 interview into 5 content pieces, puts the pack to work on a recording.