David · Gor

Writing

Measuring Voice.

A working series on what voice is actually made of, and how to measure it. The methods are borrowed from literary stylometry, where they've been in use for forty years and almost never pointed at a brand. Published openly — the useful thing here is being early, not being secretive.

The series

What Burrows's Delta actually measures — and why voice lives in "the", "of" and "but"Coming soon

The most-used method in computational authorship attribution ignores every word you'd think matters. It works on function words, because that's where unconscious habit sits. What that implies for brand voice is not what most people expect.

Method
Why AI detectors fail, from a stylometrist's perspectiveComing soon

Detection and attribution are different problems with different error profiles. Understanding why one is hard explains why the tools your compliance team is evaluating will keep producing confident nonsense in both directions.

Method
The tells: a working taxonomy of structural AI signaturesComing soon

A dozen named failure patterns, each with diagnosis criteria and a fix. Not word lists — structures. This is the checklist I audit against, published in full and revised as it earns revision.

Taxonomy
Sameness: what happens when a whole category prompts the same modelsComing soon

A measured look at convergence across competitors in one industry. If three brands read interchangeably, positioning has a problem no messaging workshop will find.

Analysis

Teardowns

Close reading, with the numbers attached.

Public pieces read the way I'd read them in an audit. Published work only, and the point is never that someone did badly — it's what the prose reveals about the system that produced it.

A stylometric anatomy of a rewriteComing soon

One page, before and after, with the measurements that changed and the ones that didn’t.

Teardown
Where a good brand voice slips under volumeComing soon

A publisher whose early work has a distinct signature and whose recent work has less of it. Tracked across two years.

Teardown

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New entries in Measuring Voice, plus the occasional teardown, sent when there's something worth sending. No cadence promises, no drip sequence.

Working on this yourself?

Twenty minutes, no pitch.

If you're publishing at volume and something in the output isn't sitting right, I'm happy to look at it with you.

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