Your voice as a linter
A style guide nobody enforces is only a document. Developers solved the equivalent problem decades ago by making the rules executable and the same tooling works on prose: Vale is a linter for writing.
There is a conspicuous gap in it. Vale's official package registry contains twenty-six styles: documentation house styles, generic prose checkers, markup support and rules for particular kinds of writing, such as commit messages, fiction and scientific papers. Since September 2026 Vale also ships four Voices, which turn a writing register into rules. None of the packages and none of the Voices is a brand voice: a Voice is a register anyone can adopt, not the way one company writes.
This sits under the AI writing tells and the tool at the end of it emits a configured style along with the rest of your files.
Can a brand voice be a linter rule set?
Partly. It helps to know where the line is. Vale is unusually clear about what it is: its own documentation states that it is not a general-purpose writing aid, that it does not teach you how to write and that it is a tool for writers rather than a replacement for one.
More to the point, it offers no opinions of its own. The documentation says so directly: Vale does not offer any of its own advice, it offers a framework for creating and enforcing custom rules. It describes itself as focused on consistency across multiple authors rather than on general correctness.
That is exactly the shape a brand voice needs. You are not asking whether the writing is good. You are asking whether it obeys decisions you already made.
Which of its checks does a voice rule map onto?
Vale has eleven extension points and a rule declares which one it uses. Most of a voice document maps onto four of them.
| Check | What it does | Voice rule it carries |
|---|---|---|
| existence | Finds a regex pattern | Banned words, forbidden punctuation |
| substitution | Replaces a pattern with a preferred string | Say this, not that |
| occurrence | Counts matches in a scope | Rationing exclamation marks |
| capitalization | Enforces a case style | Sentence case in headings |
| metric | Computes a readability formula | A reading-age target |
| consistency | Flags mixing two accepted forms | One spelling variant throughout |
| conditional | Requires B wherever A appears | Define an acronym on first use |
| repetition | Finds repeated matches | Word echo |
| sequence | Matches part-of-speech patterns | Rarely useful for a voice |
| spelling | Runs a dictionary | Locale spelling |
| script | Runs a small program over the text | Sentence rhythm, when nothing else fits |
Every rule shares the same header regardless of check: the extension point it uses, the message shown when it fires and a severity level that decides whether the rule is a suggestion, a warning or an error. Severity turns a voice guide from a leaflet into a gate.
Why is no published package a brand voice?
This is checkable rather than asserted. Vale's official registry is a single file listing every package it offers. On 26 September 2026 there were twenty-six: A11y, AiTells, ai-tells, alex, AsciiDoc, AsciiDocDITA, Comments, Commits, Diataxis, Elastic, Fiction, Google, Harper, Hugo, Joblint, Journals, MDX, Microsoft, neighbor, OpenShiftAsciiDoc, proselint, Readability, RedHat, Salesforce, Std and write-good. The four Voices, Direct, GenZ, Coach and Simple, are published separately from the registry and encode a register rather than a brand.
The house styles among them are documentation standards. Microsoft's own package README describes it as an implementation of the Microsoft Writing Style Guide, which is a technical documentation standard. Google's is the Google developer documentation style guide. There is no Mailchimp, no Monzo, no brand of any kind.
That is not an oversight by the Vale project. It is what happens when a tool is adopted by technical writers and never reaches marketing teams, who keep their standards in a slide deck. The tooling has been sitting there the whole time.
What cannot be linted, and what to do about it?
The honest half and the reason to trust the other one. A linter matches patterns. Anything that requires knowing what the writing means is out of reach.
- Whether a claim is true. No pattern distinguishes an accurate sentence from a confident wrong one.
- Whether the writing is specific. Generic prose is grammatical, which is exactly why a checker passes it.
- Whether the tone fits the moment. The same sentence is right in an onboarding email and wrong in an outage notice.
- Whether a joke is funny. Humour is high-risk for a brand and no rule catches a bad joke.
- Whether the structure serves the reader. Order and emphasis are editorial judgements.
The answer to all five is the same and it is not more rules: those are review and a linter exists so that review can spend its attention on them instead of on spelling variants. The wider list of what a voice file cannot fix sets out the rest.
Why does the false-positive rate decide whether anyone keeps using it?
Because a checker that cries wolf gets switched off, and once it is off the standard is gone with it. This is the ordinary fate of a linter introduced with too many rules at once.
Build it up in this order. Start with the rules everyone already agrees on and set them to error. Add the contentious ones as suggestions, where they inform rather than block. A rule that fires on correct writing costs more than the rule is worth.
This site publishes no false-positive figure of its own, because it has not measured one and it does not publish measurements it has not made.
Where should it run?
Wherever the writing happens, and as early as possible. In an editor while drafting, in a pull request for anything kept in version control, and in a scheduled check over published pages if you have a large estate.
Each severity level has one job: errors block, warnings surface, suggestions inform. A voice standard that fails a build is a real standard, and one that only exists in a document is a preference.
The download includes a configured style built from the same rules as the rest of your files, so the checker and the instructions cannot disagree.
Where these come from
Every claim above is quoted from one of these, and each was read on the date beside it. If one of them has changed since, the page is wrong and we would like to know.
- Vale: what it is, and what it refuses to be checked 2026-08-17
- Vale: styles and the eleven extension points checked 2026-08-17
- Vale: the official package registry checked 2026-09-26
- Vale: Voices, a writing register as rules checked 2026-09-26
- Vale: the Microsoft package, a documentation style guide checked 2026-08-17
If you cannot run a standard, it is a preference: generate the rules and the checker together.
Advertisement.
Also from Best Served Cold.
