{"id":458,"date":"2026-06-12T10:33:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T10:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/?p=458"},"modified":"2026-06-12T10:33:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T10:33:42","slug":"finding-my-voice-with-claude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/?p=458","title":{"rendered":"Finding my voice with Claude?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I like writing. I also don&#8217;t seem to have much time to do it since, as HoD at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ucl.ac.uk\/bartlett\/casa\">The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis<\/a>, I have a <em>lot<\/em> of meetings. So I wondered: can Claude speak <em>for<\/em> me? Reader, it can&#8217;t. But it can tell me quite a bit about <em>how<\/em> I speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Weirdly, it&#8217;s quite helpful to have &#8216;someone&#8217; point out (amongst many other things) that my talks use\/follow:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>British register, formal-on-slide \/ colloquial-in-notes.<\/strong> Slide bodies are short and grammatically formal; notes are warm, first-person, and frank. The asymmetry is the voice.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The long-view scepticism.<\/strong> Refusing &#8220;this time it&#8217;s different&#8221; claims is a recurring intellectual move.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Pop-cultural and literary anchoring.<\/strong> Strangelove, &#8220;One more thing&#8230;&#8221;, xkcd, Jill Lepore, Alfred Weber. Cultural references are load-bearing, not decorative.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The &#8220;yes, X, but also Y&#8221; construction.<\/strong> Nothing is presented as uncomplicated. Comfortable conclusions are interrupted, then qualified, then committed to anyway.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Apparently, somewhere in the past 20 years I became British!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Motivation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For me, the driver of all this is that I&#8217;m a much faster and better editor than I am a writer, but I know that &#8216;out of the box&#8217; Claude has a fairly anodyne style, so I&#8217;ve been curious about what it could do if trained on some of my own &#8216;source material&#8217;. And since I primarily work with open source presentation frameworks when speaking to academics or teaching my <a href=\"https:\/\/jreades.github.io\/fsds\/\">Foundations of Spatial Data Science module<\/a>, I figured it would have a fairly easy time parsing them and looking for patterns because the structure and style would be more evident than in a PowerPoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had a strong suspicion it would spot the patterns but really struggle to replicate them. And I was right. Claude really dropped some clangers when asked to write a talk using my &#8216;voice&#8217;. Clearly, I&#8217;m not <a href=\"https:\/\/causalinf.substack.com\/s\/claude-code\">Scott Cunningham<\/a> live-coding an econometrics talk, and without having his level of Claude-fu, it seems to me that for formulaic writing it&#8217;s probably just about passable if you don&#8217;t honestly care about the details. But I&#8217;m a lit grad, so that was a non-starter for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the <em>second<\/em> thing I was interested in is whether it could help me to edit my work. To me, the answer to that question was more interesting: Claude was good at identifying patterns, and so it could spot when I deviated from them. And that prompted me to think about what I was trying to achieve with my presentational tics. It also turned out to be good at picking up on slides\/slide sequences that I knew didn&#8217;t quite work but couldn&#8217;t quite figure out <em>why<\/em>; it didn&#8217;t often come with the &#8216;right&#8217; suggestion for fixing those issues, but it nearly always helped me to figure it out on my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To put it another way: since no colleague, however great, is ever going to review all of my talks, having an &#8216;editor&#8217; on tap has been really useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Developing the Prompt<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My first, naive approach fed in an assortment of Reveal.js talks that I&#8217;ve given over the past few years and the output threw everything Claude found into a single file that liberally mixed the &#8216;mechanics&#8217; of the presentation framework with the &#8216;substance&#8217; of how I approach a presentation. In its first iteration Claude failed to distinguish between these, so it treated &#8220;You often use a question in this way&#8221; as equivalent to &#8220;You used a picture from the British Library in several talks so that must be a preference&#8221;. So the prompt now splits these into discrete recommendations, allowing Claude to make suggestions for PowerPoint that are different from Reveal.js, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And, of course, I don&#8217;t just have one presentationtal approach: how I &#8216;present&#8217; to my colleagues is quite different from how I speak to other academics, professionals, or to students. To make Claude&#8217;s feedback more useful, the analysis suggested by the prompt now distinguishes between them. In my case there are now internal\/external audience reports and I should add one for student lectures too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a final step, I also asked Claude to offer suggestions for improvement based on well-regarded academic presenters with whom it was familiar. I was quite specific about <em>not<\/em> wanting TED-X style feedback since I suspect that looms large in its training material. So it suggested people like Mary Beard, which was nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Across these iterations Claude continued to do well in terms of picking up the patterns in my approach to public speaking&#8230; which is pretty much what you&#8217;d expect from the most powerful pattern-recognition algorithm we&#8217;ve yet developed!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Prompt<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rather than paste in the prompt, I&#8217;ve made it available here: <a href=\"http:\/\/reades.com\/fun\/PROMPT.md\">PROMPT.md<\/a>. It&#8217;s a plain Markdown document that will prompt Claude (or, presumably, your LLM of choice) to conduct a four-phase interview with you in order to develop a set of per-audience guidance that you can load whenever you&#8217;re editing a talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Credits<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Photo by <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/@noaa?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">NOAA<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/grayscale-photography-of-man-using-machine-HFYczZkqCoE?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\">Unsplash<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Two rounds of feedback from Claude using the uploaded Prompt.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wondered: can Claude speak for me? Reader, it can&#8217;t. But it can tell me quite a bit about how I speak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":459,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126,2,11],"tags":[124,123,125],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-coding","category-tech","tag-ai","tag-claude","tag-llm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.reades.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}