Tone of Voice

March 2, 2026

In recent weeks, months, year — I've fallen more and more in love with the concept of having a unique "tone of voice."

In a time where searching for "AI slop" has reached new all-time highs and pretty much all organic content seems to be written or influenced by AI, this for me is a last bastion of original writing. Just to be clear: this is not at all against the use of LLMs or "AI" (whatever that means these days — insert Modi meme here saying Artificial Intelligence); we're living in a new time. And rightfully so. I am the furthest thing from a person saying that everything used to be better in the good old times.

In fact, I'd assume 90% of my emails are written with at least some sort of assistance of AI. Which is absolutely fine for this kind of work. I'd propose splitting writing however into various subgroups:

• Transactional & legal — this is your average business email, proposal, contract, etc.
• Creative — this is your Kafka, your Dostoevsky, your Shakespeare, your Aristotle.
• Journalistic — deep diving on topics. I've become a huge fan of Mario Gabriele's The Generalist here, falling in love with them ever since their series on Founders Fund (which made me pay for a Substack for the very first time).
• Academic — don't think I have to go too deep on this — you can check everything you need on nature.com.

For most of those tasks, using LLMs is amazing & a real productivity hack.

However, as the conversation shifts more and more towards context — I'd propose treating tone of voice as one of the key pieces of context, because this is the way to not give up your identity, your edge, your way of thinking — even tho spellcheckers might flag it.