Codeuteronomy

Epistles

II

The voice test

Would they believe you wrote it? Strip the tells until the answer is yes.

The eleventh law gets sharpest exactly where a real person you know will read the words. The test is simple and brutal: would they believe you wrote it? Machine drafts fail that test two ways, by texture, the tells every reader is learning, and by tone, the flattering, over-eager register that reads as either insincere or foreign to how you actually talk. Both are fixable; both must actually be fixed.

Sometimes the correct amount of machine in a message is none. For the notes where your unpolished voice is the value, an apology, a condolence, an inside joke, drafting in the machine only launders out the humanity. Know which messages those are before asking for a draft, and for everything else, edit until the voice test passes with someone who knows exactly how you sound.

How to practice it