GLOSSARY · GHOSTWRITING
Voice profile
A voice profile is a measured description of how a specific person writes, built from samples of their own writing rather than from adjectives. It records observable features such as average sentence length and variation, how often sentence fragments appear, the punctuation the writer favours, use of contractions, typical paragraph length, preferred openers and closers, and words or phrases the person uses often or never. Ghostwriters and AI drafting tools use a voice profile to keep drafts consistent with the person's real voice and to check a finished draft against something concrete instead of a feeling.
How it works in practice
The difference between a voice profile and a vague brief like "confident but warm" is that a profile can be checked. If a person's posts average fourteen words a sentence with regular one-line fragments, a draft of twenty-five-word sentences with no fragments is wrong regardless of how it feels. To build one, collect a representative set of the person's own writing: LinkedIn posts, emails, transcripts of them speaking. Measure rhythm (sentence length and how much it varies), structure (paragraph length, use of lists, where line breaks fall), punctuation habits (colons, dashes, parentheses, question marks), register (contractions, slang, formality) and vocabulary (recurring phrases, banned words).
Record the result as numbers and short lists. A voice profile is not the same as a voice guide, though people use the terms loosely. The profile is the measurement; the guide is the set of rules and examples a writer follows, which usually includes the profile plus topics, positions and things the person will never say. Profiles should be refreshed every few months because people change how they write, and a profile built from a founder's 2023 posts will drift from how they sound now. Tools such as Klype measure some of these features automatically from pasted posts; a careful ghostwriter can do it by hand in an afternoon.
Example
A profile for a founder might read: median sentence 11 words, 30 percent of paragraphs are single lines, uses contractions always, never uses exclamation marks, opens most posts with a flat statement rather than a question, closes with a one-line takeaway.
Common mistake
Describing voice in adjectives only. "Direct, human, no fluff" cannot be checked, so every reviewer applies their own taste and drafts drift toward generic LinkedIn tone within weeks.