Getting It to Write How You Want

What You'll Need

⏱ Time: 15 minutes  |  📋 Tasks:

• Open your preferred chatbot: chatgpt.com, claude.ai, or gemini.google.com
• Have a rough draft of something you wrote handy (an email, a bio, a description)
• Keep this lesson open in a second tab to follow along

The Meaning Is There, but the Voice Is Wrong

You ask for a professional email and get back something that sounds like a corporate press release — stiff, impersonal, full of phrases nobody actually says. Or you ask for something funny and the model tries too hard, like a comedian who doesn't know when to stop. The meaning is there, but the voice is wrong.

Since the model can sound formal, playful, urgent, warm, or deadpan — matching any tone — the trick is helping it understand what you sound like.

System vs User Prompts

There are two ways to give instructions to a model, and understanding the difference is the key to consistent tone.

System prompt: permanent instructions the model follows for the whole conversation. Think of it as an employee handbook — it sets the rules once, and they apply to every task that follows. You might write "Always use contractions. Keep responses under 100 words. Address the reader directly." and the model will follow those rules until you change them.

User prompt: the specific task you want done right now. This is today's assignment — "Draft a follow-up email to a client who hasn't responded." The system prompt stays in the background, shaping every response the model gives.

Most free chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) don't expose system prompts directly. You fake it by putting your tone and style instructions first, before the task. The model reads left to right — whatever it sees first carries the most weight.

Try Describing Tone

Start your prompt with style instructions — "Use contractions. Keep sentences under 20 words. Sound direct but friendly." — then, on a new line, add your actual task. The first few sentences act as your temporary system prompt; the last line is the assignment. You'll notice the output follows the style you set, not the model's default voice.

Why not "You are a copywriter"? Telling the model it is someone (a lawyer, a scientist, a CEO) can make its responses more confidently wrong — it tries to embody the persona rather than sticking to what it knows. Describing the style you want — use contractions, keep sentences short — achieves the same tone without the hallucination risk. Stick to instructions about the output, not claims about the model's identity.

Exercise: Write Better Drafts

Let's walk through this with a real example. You can follow along in your chatbot right now.

Start with a rough draft. Imagine you wrote this email to a client who went quiet after a proposal meeting:

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to follow up on the proposal that we discussed last week. Please let me know if you have any questions or if you would like to move forward. I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

It's not wrong — it's just stiff. "I hope you are doing well" and "at your earliest convenience" are filler phrases that tell the reader nothing. Let's fix it in three rounds.

Round 1: Rewrite for clarity

Open your chatbot and paste:

I wrote this draft email to a client who hasn't responded after a proposal meeting. Rewrite it to sound more natural. Keep my key points but remove the filler phrases.

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to follow up on the proposal that we discussed last week. Please let me know if you have any questions or if you would like to move forward. I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

The model will likely produce something cleaner — shorter sentences, fewer pleasantries, the proposal follow-up moved earlier. But it may still sound generic. That's normal. Round 1 captures your meaning; rounds 2 and 3 capture your voice.

Round 2: Add tone guidance

Now add a second instruction. Type this into the same chat:

Now make it warmer. Use contractions. Sound like you're writing to someone you've met and liked, not a stranger. Avoid "I hope" and "at your earliest convenience."

Compare the output to Round 1. The sentences are shorter. The tone shifted from formal to friendly. "I wanted to follow up" becomes "I'm checking in." "Please let me know" becomes "Do you have any questions?" — the difference between a form letter and an actual email.

Round 3: Add structural constraints

One more round. Tell the model:

Cut it to 3 sentences. Start with the reason I'm writing. End with a specific question that makes it easy for them to reply.

The output you'll see is something like:

Notice what changed: the first sentence now states the purpose immediately. The middle sentence offers a specific next step. The last sentence asks a direct question — no "let me know," no "at your convenience." It's an email someone would actually reply to.

Three rounds, three minutes. The first captured your meaning, the second captured your tone, the third captured your structure. That's the whole process.

Your Takeaway — The Voice Card

The single most useful thing you can do is create a voice card — a short block of instructions that tells the model how you want to sound. Paste it at the start of any chat, and the model will stay on voice for the whole conversation.

Here's the template. Save it somewhere you can copy-paste:

You are helping me write [content type].

My voice is:
- [professional / casual / playful / direct]
- Use [contractions / no contractions]
- Sentence length: [short and punchy / detailed and flowing]
- Avoid: [jargon / emoji / rhetorical questions]
- Preferred phrases: [any specific go-tos]

Now help me with the following task:

Here's what it looks like filled in for a small business owner who writes their own emails:

You are helping me write a client follow-up email.

My voice is:
- Direct but friendly
- Use contractions
- Short sentences
- Avoid: corporate buzzwords, "I hope," "at your earliest convenience"

Now draft an email checking in on the proposal I sent last week.

Fill in your own preferences — formal or casual, long sentences or short, jargon allowed or banned — and you'll never have to explain your tone to a model again.

Try It

This week, run the 3-round walkthrough with a piece of writing you actually need — an email you've been putting off, a bio that doesn't sound like you, a proposal that reads too stiff. Open your chatbot and follow the same steps:

1. Paste your draft and ask for a rewrite that keeps your key points
2. Add tone guidance — contractions, sentence length, words to avoid
3. Add structure constraints — sentence count, where the main point goes, how it ends

Save the output from round 3. Then create your voice card by copying what you said in round 2 into the template. Use it on your next writing task and compare the result to what you got today. One card, zero rewriting from scratch.