voice-profile

Voice profile — write toward something, not just away from tells

/humanize is the negative direction: it finds AI tells and says what to remove. That leaves a draft that is merely less bad.

This is the positive direction: a written description of how you actually write, extracted from your own published work, so a draft can be measured against a target instead of a taboo list.

What this does not do. A voice profile makes prose sound like your prose. It does not make model-generated text stop reading as model-generated to a neural detector — nothing an LLM applies to its own output does. See writing-with-ai.md. Use this to write well in your own register; write the load-bearing sentences yourself.

Building the profile

1. Assemble the corpus, and count it

Three to twelve of your own pieces where you were the primary writer. Published papers are best — they survived editing. Mix genres if you write in several (paper, referee report, grant, teaching notes); the profile should note where your register changes.

find <corpus-dir> -maxdepth 1 \( -name '*.pdf' -o -name '*.tex' \) | wc -l

(find, not a glob — in zsh an unmatched glob aborts the whole command, which reports 0 and defeats the count this step exists for.)

Count before starting. A corpus of eleven is a different task from four, and discovering that halfway through is how a session gets reset.

2. One subagent per document — never load the corpus into one context

Per pdf-processing.md: spawn one subagent per document in a fresh context. Each reads only its own file, writes a ~300-word note to notes/voice/<name>.md against the fixed schema below, and returns only the filename.

The main session then reads only the notes. Loading a whole corpus at once has repeatedly forced a session reset after partial work was already lost.

Per-document note schema — the same six headings every time, so the synthesis can compare:

## Lexicon      words and phrases used repeatedly; words conspicuously avoided
## Rhythm       typical sentence length; variance; where long sentences appear
## Openings     how sections and paragraphs begin; how the paper opens
## Transitions  the actual connectives used, verbatim, with rough frequency
## Hedging      how uncertainty is expressed; how strong claims are made
## Quirks       anything distinctive — punctuation habits, first person, humour, footnotes

3. Synthesize, and mark what is stable

Read only the notes. A trait belongs in the profile if it appears across most of the corpus, not because one paper did it once. Record frequencies where you can: "'note that' appears in 7 of 9 papers; 'delve' appears in none."

Write to voice-profile.md at the repo root (allowlisted in the repo-hygiene gate). Include:

Signature vocabulary and the avoid list — words the author demonstrably does not use.
Sentence rhythm, with a number: median length, and where the long ones land.
Structural habits — how an introduction is built, where the contribution paragraph sits, how results are framed.
Hedging register — the author's actual calibration language, which is usually narrower than a model's default.
Deliberate quirks, labelled as deliberate. "Uses em-dashes frequently and on purpose" stops /humanize from flagging a habit as an AI tell.
Where the register shifts by genre.

4. Wire it in

/humanize reads voice-profile.md when present and respects documented preferences — a quirk you have declared deliberate is no longer a finding. Point drafting work at the profile before it writes, not after.

Auditing a draft

Pass --audit followed by a filename to compare an existing draft against the profile instead of building one:

/voice-profile --audit main.tex

Report, per section: distance from the profile, with concrete evidence — vocabulary outside your range, hedging denser than your baseline, transitions you do not use, sentence rhythm that has flattened. Every finding cites the profile line it violates, so it is a deduction rather than taste.

Read-only. Auto-rewriting prose degrades it and introduces new tells, and it cannot change what a detector sees. The report says where and why; the author edits.

Anti-patterns

Profiling coauthored work you did not draft. You will extract someone else's voice.
Treating the profile as a rulebook. It describes what you have done, not what you must do. Voices change; re-profile after a few new papers.
Building it from AI-assisted drafts. The profile will encode the model's register as yours — the corpus must be work you wrote.
Using it to pass a detector. It is a writing aid, not a laundering step. If a venue wants an AI-use statement, make one (/submission-disclosures).

Cross-references

writing-with-ai.md — readability vs provenance, and the human-readable standard
/humanize — the negative direction; reads this profile when it exists
/proofread — grammar and consistency, a separate lens
pdf-processing.md — the one-subagent-per-document pattern