Style extraction
- Industry term
Style extraction is studying a person's own writing to find its patterns, such as openings, sentence length, level of detail, and sign-offs, so later drafts can follow them.
Words like “warm” or “direct” describe a voice without showing it, so a model left with them guesses at the phrasing. Given your own messages, the assistant can compare them, list what repeats, and quote an example of each pattern, which gives the model something concrete to match.
Where you’ll meet it
You give the assistant twenty of your sent emails so it can learn your voice. Half went to clients and half to close friends. Its style notes now call for inside jokes and exclamation points, and the next client draft comes out far too casual.
What to do
Have the assistant sort the emails by who they went to, then write separate notes for clients and for friends. Read the client notes before they're saved, and cross out anything that only fits your friends.
Easy to mix up
| Style extraction | Fine-tuning |
|---|---|
| Edit or delete the style notes | Return to the model from before it was retrained on your emails |
Check yourself
Your style notes say you open emails with “Hope you're well!” and quote one of your sent emails as the example. Is that quote enough reason to keep the rule?
Go deeperStyle can be counted, and passing writing off as another's needs consent
Stylometry, a much older field, studies authorship through countable features such as sentence length and how often small words like “upon” appear. Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace used it in 1964 to attribute the disputed Federalist Papers to James Madison.
Notes about phrasing can't supply your judgment, your facts, or what you know about the reader. A draft that sounds like you still needs you to check what it says before it goes out under your name.
Writing in another person's manner is an old practice, in parody, pastiche, and writing exercises. What needs that person's agreement is sending the result as if they wrote it. Where readers expect your own words, tell them when an assistant drafted the message.