Collect the writing that was actually for someone

Sixty thousand words go into the folder in one lump. Somebody decides to teach a model how they write, so they export everything they have ever typed. Four years of chat messages, a wedding speech, the invoice notes, a cover letter, the two posts that did well. What comes back is grammatically theirs and belongs to nobody.

That is not the model failing. It is an average, and it did exactly what it was asked. The average of a person writing fast and the same person writing carefully is a third person who has never existed.

The instinct underneath is that more input makes a sharper picture, and it does the exact reverse. Every extra register drags the numbers toward the middle, and the middle is the flat competent register you were trying to get away from.

The rules

You are not collecting your writing. You are collecting the writing you did for one reader. Pick the audience the output has to land with. Customers, peers, the people on your list, strangers who arrived cold. Everything you wrote for them goes in. Everything you wrote for anybody else stays out, however good it was.

Your fast register and your deliberate register are two different writers. The reply you fired off in ninety seconds and the piece you edited four times do not share a rhythm. Both are you, and only one of them is the one you want reproduced at scale, so you have to decide which before you collect anything.

Published beats drafted. Writing that actually went out got the pass where you cut the clever bit and fixed the opening. A draft you abandoned is a record of you failing at your own standard. Teaching a model from your failures is a peculiar plan.

Two thousand words is enough. Twenty thousand is worse. You are measuring shape, not accumulating evidence. Eight to fifteen real pieces will do it. Past that you are adding noise and quietly widening the range the model is allowed to write inside.

Cut everything you did not write. Quoted paragraphs, pasted client copy, the boilerplate at the bottom, headings a template handed you, anything a colleague rewrote. It is your file and it should contain nothing but you. Do this before you count a single word.

Do it now

Make a folder. Inside it, one file called corpus.txt, plain text, no formatting furniture.

Open the place your real writing lives and pick eight to fifteen pieces that went to the reader you chose. Paste them in, separated by a blank line. Strip the quotes, the signatures and anything somebody else touched.

Then put one sentence at the top of the file, above everything. Name the reader and the register in that sentence, not the topic. Something closer to this shape:

Written for people who already run a business and are deciding whether to trust me. Deliberate register, edited.

A worked example

Say you are a solo wedding photographer. You write every client email, every enquiry reply and every blog post yourself. The job you want a model drafting is the enquiry reply, so the reader is a couple who has enquired and not booked yet.

Everything written for anybody else stays out. That includes the blog, however well it did.

First line: Written for couples who have enquired and not yet booked. Deliberate register, edited.
In:         9 enquiry replies that went out, each written fresh
In:         3 emails sent after a first video call with a couple
Out:        blog posts, written for strangers arriving from a search
Out:        gallery delivery emails, written to couples already booked
Out:        two-line replies sent from the phone between shoots
Cut:        signatures, the couple's own questions quoted back, the pasted price list
wc -w corpus.txt
2140 corpus.txt

Twelve pieces, one reader, 2,140 words. Inside the range.

The failure you will hit

You will want to include the best thing you ever wrote even though it went to a different reader. It is the piece you would show somebody. Leave it out. A corpus is not a portfolio, and one brilliant off-register piece in eight will move your numbers further than four ordinary on-register ones will hold them still. Put it in a second file and build a second profile later if you want it.

Not for you if

You write for one person who already knows you, and the rhythm never has to survive a stranger reading it cold. Building a measured profile for an audience of one is work you will never earn back.

That is the corpus built. Step 2 turns it into numbers. Content & Copywriting is one of the Vault's categories.