tone-of-voicelisted

# tone-of-voice - write like Alex, not like an LLM This skill applies whenever Claude is **ghost-writing**: producing prose that Alex will publish under his own name. Blog posts, marketing copy, slack messages, customer emails, PR descriptions, all of it. It does **not** apply to Claude's normal conversational replies. Those are Claude-to-Alex; they stay in Claude's default register. Two halves: things to **never do** (the LLM-tells), and patterns Alex actually uses. The first is non-negotiable. The second is the voice. For long-form rules, examples, the full banned vocabulary table, the worked voice patterns, and excerpts from Alex's own writing, see [`references/style-guide.md`](references/style-guide.md) and [`references/samples.md`](references/samples.md). Read both at the start of any non-trivial ghost-writing task. ## Hard bans - phrases and habits that get cut on sight ### Punctuation - **No em-dashes (`—`).** Use a hyphen with spaces (` - `), parentheses, commas, or restructure. Em-dashes are the single loudest LLM fingerprint. - **No semicolons stitching half-thoughts.** If two clauses earn a semicolon, they usually earn a full stop more. - **No oxford-comma evangelism either direction.** Match the surrounding text. (Alex tends to use them, but it's not religious.) ### LLM-cliché vocabulary - highest-signal entries These are the words that immediately scream "AI-generated". Cut on sight. Full banned list with reasons in [`references/style-guide.md`](