What to document
Adjectives are useless on their own. Every brand claims to be friendly, professional, and human. What makes a guide usable is pairs of examples: this sentence, not that one, with a line explaining the difference.
- Sentence length and rhythm, with samples
- Whether you use contractions, first person, and questions
- Vocabulary you prefer and vocabulary you ban
- How you handle bad news, pricing, and uncertainty
- Before-and-after rewrites of real copy from your own site
| Voice | Tone | |
|---|---|---|
| Changes | Never | With context |
| Example | Plain, direct, evidence-led | Warmer in a welcome, plainer in an outage |
| Documented as | Rules, bans, and examples | Scenarios and sample rewrites |
| Fails when | Written as adjectives | Nobody enforces it in review |
Why it matters more now
Most marketing teams now draft with a model. A tone guide made of adjectives gives a model nothing to work with and produces the flat, competent prose that reads as machine-written. A guide made of examples and bans is something a model can follow closely.
That is also the defensible part. When anyone can generate serviceable copy in seconds, a voice that sounds like a specific company rather than a category is one of the few remaining differences a reader notices.
Keeping it honest
A tone guide only holds if someone enforces it in review. The quickest test on any draft: read it aloud, and if it sounds like a brochure rather than a colleague explaining something, the guide was ignored.
Why it matters for B2B marketing teams
Now that every marketing team drafts with a model, a tone guide made of adjectives produces exactly the flat prose that reads as machine-written. A guide made of bans and before-and-after examples is one of the few remaining ways a B2B site sounds like a company rather than a category.