Write a house style note once and get better AI drafts forever

You generate a draft, read it, and recognise the problem immediately: it is fine. It says the right things in the way everybody says them. So you rewrite the opening, cut the word delighted, take out the second exclamation mark and put your own sentence rhythm back. Then next week you generate another draft and make exactly the same edits. You are not training anything. You are doing the same corrections on a loop, and the fix is to write them down once.

Why generic drafts stay generic

Ask for an email about a product launch and you will get the average of every launch email ever written, because that is a reasonable answer to a question with no constraints in it. The output is not bad. It is central. It sits exactly where the middle of the distribution sits, and the middle is where everyone else's emails already are.

Being specific in the prompt helps, but only for that one draft. Next week you start again from the same neutral position and you re-type the same three instructions you typed last time, slightly worse because you are in a hurry. A house style note is simply the decision to stop retyping them.

The genuinely hard part is describing your own voice, and it is hard because self-description is unreliable. Most people write down what they wish they sounded like. The way round this is to stop describing and start quoting: paste two paragraphs you were happy with, and let the sample carry the information that your adjectives cannot. If you want to see where drafts are generated, the email marketing feature page shows the tools that sit alongside your customer list.

Prompting each time versus writing it down once

The comparison here is not between doing this and doing nothing. It is between the ad hoc version everybody already does and the written version almost nobody does.

What goes on the page

Keep it to one side of A4. A long style guide is a document nobody reads, including you, and it dilutes the instructions that matter. Six sections is enough.

1. 1Who you are writing to, in one specific sentence. Not "my audience" but "a freelance illustrator who has been meaning to sell prints for two years and is nervous about pricing them".
2. 2What you sound like, in three adjectives you can defend, followed by an admission of what you are not. "Direct, dry, occasionally blunt. Not warm, not chatty."
3. 3Two or three real paragraphs of your own writing that you were pleased with. This is the most useful part of the whole page and the part people leave out.
4. 4Your banned list. Words, phrases and habits you never want to see: hype adjectives, exclamation marks, rhetorical questions as openers, the phrase you cannot stand.
5. 5Structural rules. How long a paragraph runs, whether you use subheadings in email, one link per send or several, how you sign off.
6. 6Your standing facts. What you sell, what it costs, what you never claim. This is where you note that you do not promise results, so no draft ever tries to.
7. 7One line on the reader's state of mind when the email arrives — tired, on a phone, halfway through something else. It changes sentence length more than any tone instruction.

Describing your voice produces a description. Pasting your voice produces your voice.— The single most useful rule for this exercise

What changes after a fortnight

Suppose you write four emails a month. Before the note, each one took a generated draft plus twenty minutes of restoring your voice: cutting the enthusiastic opener, shortening the paragraphs, removing two phrases you would never say. That is over an hour a month spent making the same corrections, and the corrections were never quite consistent because you were doing them from memory.

After the note, the draft arrives already inside your constraints. The editing does not disappear — it becomes shorter and more interesting, because you are now improving arguments rather than removing adjectives. The second effect is subtler and more valuable: your emails start sounding like your product pages, because the same page guides both. Consistency of voice across a storefront is one of those things nobody compliments and everybody notices. You can see the wider set of writing tools on the features overview, and what Fanzy handles on the page side.

The mistake most people make

They write the note as a brand document. Mission, values, a paragraph about authenticity, three adjectives that could describe anybody. It reads beautifully and changes nothing, because none of it is actionable. A style note earns its place through specifics that can be obeyed or broken: a banned word list, a maximum paragraph length, a real sample. The test is simple — read your note and ask whether someone could fail to follow it. If every sentence in it is impossible to disobey, you have written a mood board rather than a set of instructions. The second mistake is writing it once and never revising it. Add to the banned list every time you catch yourself making the same edit twice; that is the whole maintenance routine, and it takes a few seconds.

It is forty minutes of work that you will benefit from every week for as long as you keep writing. That ratio is unusual enough to be worth acting on today rather than adding to a list. Open a blank page, paste two paragraphs you were proud of, and write down the three edits you are tired of making.