IMPORTANT NOTICE: With your indulgence, I’m going to send you a second email this week. I’ve got some really big news to share. But it won’t be ripe for sharing until Wednesday. So, keep your eyes out for a new message in a couple of days. You won’t want to miss this one.
In my last post, I wrote about the beneficial use of AI as a “junior editor” making modest suggestions on how to strengthen your human-written first draft. And I showed how the quality of the AI prompt you use can really impact the quality of the suggested edits your LLM comes up with. (I use Claude here because it is most writers’ preference.)
The focus today is on the power of a next step: Taking the time to create an in-depth profile capturing your voice, writing style, language preferences, sentence structure habits, etc. Building such a profile has two big payoffs:
This memo will focus on the Claude editing dimension. But we mustn’t give short shrift to the second benefit. No matter how long we’ve been writing, most of us are more instinctive than intentional about our writing style. It’s really helpful to sit down and be challenged to answer hard questions about why you write the way you do and how you understand your craft.
Creating An AboutMe.md Profile
If you take the time to train Claude in your writing style, preferences, etc., those edits are likely to sound a lot more like you. They won’t as often employ language, style or structure you’d never use.
And the best way to do that training is to create an About-Me text file that you can instruct Claude to read before it begins any serious project. My About Me Claude folder is pretty typical with three components:
- an about-me.md documenting my writing style, voice, tone, etc.
- a my-company.md outlining things like who my OBrien On Message audience is, what my Monday memo objectives are, etc.
- an anti-AI.md laying out “sounds like AI” words, phrases and sentence structure tendencies to avoid.
100 Questions to Answer
(and Three Hours to Invest)
So, how do you create a strong About-Me profile? Here’s my favorite answer. On his How to AI platform, Ruben Hassid has developed a prompt that sets in motion an interview style conversation with Claude built around 100 questions. It covers all the basics – your tone, words you love, ones you’d never use, your favored sentence structure ( long and rolling or short and clipped), etc.
But it also digs into more interesting territory. A few examples:
- your contrarian takes (what you believe about writing that most marketers and copywriters would disagree with)
- how you distinguish persuasion from manipulation
- what you used to believe about writing and don’t believe anymore
Here’s the link to Hassid’s Claude 101: https://claude101.com. For the about.me.md setup, just go to “Claude Cowork” in Level 2.
NOTE: I always have to say this when I refer people to Ruben Hassid’s terrific Claude guidance. He’s easily the best guide out there to effective use of Claude. But he may well draw a different line than you and I do when it comes to using Claude to write first drafts.
For strong reasons I’ve laid out elsewhere, I am a strong believer in human-created first drafts.
That said, completing the 100 question interview is actually a fun exercise to go through. But it’s intensive. I think it took me about three hours when I did it. The end product: an interesting and useful summary of who you are as a writer and how you practice your craft.
I did it for my personal writing style. But if you write for an organization, it would be smart to answer in terms of your group’s identity, voice and personality.
Of course, at the end of the day, here’s the only test that matters: Does doing all this allow Claude to be a stronger, more on point editor?
From Basic Prompt to Stronger Prompt to Profile
In my May 18th memo (https://obrienonmessage.com/3284-2/), I demonstrated in what I would call a pretty convincing manner that, if you want Claude to be a strong junior editor, you have to use more than basic, mediocre prompts.
Basic mediocre prompts produce basic, mediocre output. if your prompts are more detailed and strategic, the edits Claude proposes will be more on point, more useful, and less prone to AI speak. Now let’s see what happens if we take it to the next level.
Here’s the version of the attention strategies memo that the more strategic and detailed prompt produced:
“In the attention economy, attracting eyeballs isn’t the win. Holding attention long enough to convert it into engagement, action, and loyalty is the win. But here’s where a lot of communicators get tangled up: that doesn’t mean every single post, ad, or email has to do all of that work.
A funny meme can earn its keep just by getting noticed. A breaking-news alert can succeed simply by being read. The standard you’re aiming for isn’t “did this one piece deepen the relationship?” — it’s “is my overall attention strategy moving people from a glance, to a read, to a click, to a gift?” Judge individual pieces by what they’re built to do. Judge your strategy by whether the pieces add up.”
And here is a version using exactly the same prompt. But this time, I instructed Claude to read my about-me.md profile before responding:
“Gaining attention is only half the job. The other half is holding onto it long enough to turn it into something that matters — real engagement, real relationship, real impact. That’s the standard your overall attention strategy has to meet.
But here’s where a lot of communicators tie themselves in knots: they apply that standard to every single thing they put out. But not every piece of content has to close the loop. A provocative LinkedIn post, a timely op-ed, a well-placed quote in the press — these can do their job perfectly well by pulling new people into your orbit, even if they don’t immediately deepen engagement. The question isn’t whether this piece holds attention. It’s whether your strategy, over time, does.
Think of it as two distinct jobs that have to work together. The first is attraction — getting people to stop, look, and take notice. The second is architecture — building the pathways that move people from that first glance toward genuine commitment. Both matter. But confusing the job of one with the job of the other is where attention strategies go wrong.”
The Verdict: As you can see, there are significant differences between the two versions. The profile-informed one just sounds more like me. There’s no more of the occasional AI language found in the earlier version (“attracting eyeballs isn’t the win,” “from a glance, to a read, to a click, to a gift?”). The third paragraph stepping back and reinforcing the memo’s point in another way is something I do frequently.
While I wouldn’t, I could almost adopt the second version wholesale. That’s not true of the version that didn’t reference my profile. And there are other alignments with my writing style that may be more obvious to me than to you – the more conversational tone, the use of words I lean into, the absence of ones I don’t favor, etc.
To all of you serious writers out there, I urge you to see for yourself. If you haven’t already done so, create an about-me profile in Claude. As mentioned at the outset, I think you’ll see two big payoffs.
Claude will be able to produce proposed edits and rewrites that are much closer to your style, voice and personality. And in the process, you’ll have the opportunity to really examine your writing strengths and weaknesses in a clear, intentional way.
P.S. Don’t forget to be on the watch for my Wednesday big news.
