Ever asked for "professional but friendly" and gotten something that sounds like a hotel chain? This lesson fixes that for good.
Adjectives are weak. Examples are strong.
"Professional but friendly" means something different to every person who's ever said it. Claude has to guess which version you mean, and it guesses the most average one. That's why AI writing so often sounds like AI writing.
There's a stronger tool, and it's already sitting in your sent folder. Claude is a pattern-matching machine. Paste one example of something you actually wrote and liked, and it locks onto your rhythm, your word choices, your level of formality. One real example beats a paragraph of adjectives every time.
The prompt
Copy-paste prompt
Here's an email I wrote that sounds exactly like me:
{paste one real email you wrote and liked}
Now write a reply to the message below in that same voice:
{paste the new message}
If the format matters as much as the voice, give it two or three varied examples instead of one. Three good examples of your past quotes will teach Claude your quote format better than any description could.