Voice & Style

Overview

Record the book's voice and surface conventions in style-sheet.md, then enforce them. The style sheet is the copyeditor's record: dialect and spelling choices, capitalisation, hyphenation, numbers, dialogue punctuation, a one-line voice summary per major speaker, and a watch list. Its frontmatter is machine-readable, and story prose counts violations and prose tics in every chapter. Use this skill so voice stays the same across chapters, drafting sessions, and agents.

Prerequisites

A story project with story.md in the root. story init scaffolds style-sheet.md; older projects can add it with story init "<title>" --dir . --force, which only adds missing files, or by copying references/style-sheet-guide.md's frontmatter block by hand.

When to Use

• Starting a project, once the first chapter or a writing sample exists
• Before drafting when voice has drifted between chapters or sessions
• When a copyedit pass needs a style decision recorded (the copyedit itself belongs to the line-editing skill, which reads this file)
• When the user wants a mechanical prose check before sharing a draft
• NOT for character personality or arc (use character-management)
• NOT for scene-level craft such as deep POV or subtext (use scene-craft)
• NOT for the line-by-line prose pass itself (line edit, copyedit, read-aloud, proof): use the line-editing skill, which reads this style sheet and runs these checks

Workflow

1. Build or update the style sheet

1. Read story.md (genre, POV, tense, Tone & Style), style-sheet.md, and two or three drafted chapters or a sample the user supplies. If there is no prose yet, ask the user for a paragraph that sounds right or three published books whose voice is close.
2. Fill the sections in style-sheet.md following references/style-sheet-guide.md. Record decisions the prose already makes; do not invent new ones silently. When the draft is inconsistent (both grey and gray), ask the user which form wins.
3. Set the frontmatter:
   • dialect: british | american | unspecified
   • one preferred entry per variant: use is the house form, avoid the form to flag. Repeat entries for several variants of one word.
   • watch-words: words or phrases this book overuses
   • allow-words: built-in filter words, adverbs, or dialect spellings this book uses on purpose (a proper noun like Harbor Street in a British book)
   • samples: files or folders of the author's own prose that sound right, relative to the project folder: an earlier book (../book-one) or chapters the author has approved. Ask the user which; never list prose the agent drafted and the author has not approved, or the profile measures the agent's voice. With at least 2,000 words of narration, story prose compares each chapter with the samples instead of fixed limits
4. Character Voices entries summarise each character file's Voice & Speech Patterns section in one line and link to it. Record words a speaker reaches for in the character file's voice-words list and words they would never say in voice-avoid, so story voices can check them. The character file is canon; if the two disagree, fix the style sheet, or ask the user before changing the character.

2. Draft and revise against it

• chapter-writing and discovery-drafting read style-sheet.md before drafting. Write in the recorded voice, use the house spellings, and give each speaker the recorded patterns.
• When a new convention appears mid-draft (a new invented term, a number style), add it to the style sheet in the same change.

3. Run the prose check

story prose .

The report lists, per chapter: sentence count, average and longest length, and spread; filter words and -ly adverbs per 1,000 narration words (dialogue is excluded); plain and said-bookism dialogue tags; words echoed within 30 words; watch-word counts; and avoided spellings. Across the manuscript it lists repeated 4-word phrases and character first names that readers could confuse. Warnings are advisory and the command exits 0 unless a file cannot be read. See references/prose-checks.md for what each count means and how to respond.

When the style sheet lists samples, the report opens with a profile of the author's own prose, and chapters that drift from it warn (prose-baseline-sentences, -paragraphs, -dialogue, -filter-words, -adverbs) in place of the fixed filter-word and adverb limits. Treat a drift as a prompt to reread the chapter, not a rule. Tell the user where it drifts and ask whether it is deliberate: a fight scene runs short, a quiet chapter long. Never rewrite a chapter just to move a number back inside its tolerance.

To lint a passage that is not in a chapter file yet (a draft scene, a proposed rewrite), pipe it in with - in place of the path: story prose - < draft-scene.md. Run it from the project folder, or add --path <project>, so the style sheet applies. story voices - does the same for dialogue.

4. Run the dialogue voice check

story voices .

story voices attributes a quoted line (straight "...", curly “...”, or British ‘...’) when the narration names the speaker next to a speech verb. A name before the verb wins over a name after it: in "...," Sera told Kael the line is Sera's, and said Kael gives it to Kael. With no speech-verb tag, a paragraph whose narration names exactly one character (an action beat) gives the line to that character. Names and aliases match case-sensitively as proper nouns, and titles are skipped for the given name (Lord Maren also matches Maren). Pronoun tags (she said, said he) are never attributed, and a paragraph with one is left unattributed even when its narration names another character. Only a pronoun and verb right after a closing quote or right before an opening one count as a tag; She said nothing more elsewhere is narration and does not block an action beat. In close third person the POV character is often under-counted; when that matters, name the tags in a sample chapter and rerun. Per character it reports lines, words, mean sentence length, contraction, question, and exclamation rates, and signature words used more by them than by others. It warns when a character says one of their voice-avoid words, when two characters with five or more lines each have close fingerprints ("X and Y may sound alike: similar sentence length, contractions, questions, and exclamations"), and when a character with five or more lines never says a voice-words entry. Unattributed dialogue is not counted, so a low line count may mean few named tags rather than few lines.

When two voices blur, differentiate them on more than one axis (sentence length, contractions, vocabulary, what they ask about) and see dialogue-subtext.md in the scene-craft skill for the tag-swap test.

5. Act on the findings

1. Fix avoided spellings everywhere; they are always errors of consistency.
2. Treat rates, echoes, and repeated phrases as prompts to reread the passage, not orders. Keep a flagged word when it is the right word, and add it to allow-words when the book uses it deliberately.
3. For uniform-rhythm warnings, revise sentence length by intent (short for impact, long for flow), not by formula.
4. For similar names, ask the user before renaming; check replacements with story names "<Candidate>", then use story rename character <id> "<New Name>" so references follow.
5. For story voices warnings, revise the dialogue or update the character's voice-words/voice-avoid when the draft has found a better voice; ask the user before changing canon.
6. Present a summary: what changed, what was kept on purpose, and any style-sheet updates. For a full line edit, copyedit, or proof, hand off to the line-editing skill.

CLI Maintenance

Use the Story CLI when it is available. If story is not installed, use bun run story -- from the Story Skills repository checkout or the bundled fallback node ../story-maintenance/scripts/story.js with the same arguments, resolving the path relative to this skill folder. If no CLI is available, apply the checks in references/prose-checks.md by reading.

After editing the style sheet or revising prose:

story validate .
story prose .
story voices .
story wordcount . --write
story links .

Reference Files

• references/style-sheet-guide.md - What goes in each style-sheet section, the frontmatter format, and how to extract a voice description from sample prose
• references/prose-checks.md - What each story prose count measures, its threshold, and when to keep the flagged text