Voice DNA
Does this sound like you?
Voice DNA is the corpus-primary instrument of the practice. It reads what a writer has written and returns a characterization of the voice—what it does, how it moves, what it will not do—anchored to quoted lines from the writer's own pages. Then it compiles that characterization into a personal instrument the writer keeps.
Two things it is not. It is not a grader: it never says the prose is good or bad. It is not a detector: it never rules on whether a machine was involved. It measures one thing, against one standard—the writer's own voice—and asks one question. Does this sound like you?
The mirror
A mirror, not a judge.
A judge holds your writing up to an outside standard and scores it. A mirror holds it up to itself. Voice DNA characterizes what a voice already is: the shape of its sentences, the moves it favors, the words it will not use, the way it shifts as the room changes. It has no opinion about whether that voice is good. It has one job—to show the voice clearly enough that the writer recognizes it, and to catch the places where a draft drifts off it.
Tools in this space mostly ask "human or machine?"—a question aimed at institutions, answered with a verdict. Voice DNA asks "is this you?"—a question aimed at the writer, answered with evidence they can check line by line.
Two ways in
Corpus, or interrogation.
Most writers come in through their corpus—the writing they already have. The instrument reads across it, counts what can be counted, names what recurs, and every claim it makes points back to a line on the page.
Writers with little or no corpus come in the other way: interrogation. The instrument writes badly on purpose and watches how the writer reacts. It drills down to what the writer actually cares about, floats deliberately wrong drafts, and builds the profile out of the reactions and the corrections. A writer with nothing published still comes out with a complete profile. The reaction to a bad sentence carries as much signal as a good one—often more, because a writer knows their allergies before they can name their moves.
The same listening runs inside Superposition, which helps a writer make a piece instead of a profile.
The profile
Evidence, not assertion.
The output is a profile where every claim carries its evidence. No line survives that could be true of any competent writer; if a claim would fit a stranger's profile just as well, it is cut. Each one quotes the page it came from.
She holds the sentence's subject back behind a clause of place, so the ground arrives before the person standing on it.
"Across the shingle, past the tideline where the gulls were still working, she came down at last to the water."
- source
- where the evidence lives—here, finished prose
- registers
- the cells it holds in, scoped rather than averaged flat
- stability
- present across decades—voice, not this year's fashion
- strength
- independent reads that found it; two or more is convergence
The profile is validated two ways. Across time: a writer's work from twenty years ago, set beside this year's, separates what holds from what is passing. What survives the decades is voice. What only shows up lately is fashion, and it is labeled as fashion. And by the writer: the profile is not finished until the writer reads it and recognizes themselves in it. The ear is the last check.
Then it compiles. The profile becomes a personal instrument with two faces. The audit face reads a draft against the writer's own register and flags where it stops sounding like them—their banned words, their rhythm, their rules for how the voice shifts. The framing face runs the other direction: it briefs a session before a word is written, so the work starts in the writer's voice instead of drifting toward the machine's and being dragged back.
Reads a draft against your register and flags where it stops sounding like you.
Briefs a session before a word is written, so it starts in your voice, not the machine's.
A walkthrough
Two short runs.
Meet Nadia Sorel—invented for this page. A nature-and-memory essayist who writes in long, accreting sentences, all momentum and subordinate turns. Almost nothing of hers is published, so she comes in through interrogation. The writer, the voice, and the drafts below are fiction, built to show the instrument working.
The record
Built in the open.
The method is not a pitch. It is being worked out in public, pass by pass, with its failures left in. The record lives at sageframe.substack.com.
Read the record on Substack →