Controlling Your Writing Style (Channel Voice)
The left side is a simple prompt for what to generate a writing sample about. The right side is a preview of the writing style.
Want to fine tune your style? Click the Edit Voice button.
Editing Your Channel Voice
At the top you'll see two tabs for Simple Mode and Advanced Mode.
Simple Mode
This mode allows you to provide feedback on your writing style.
It uses a chat-like interface to understand how you'd like to adjust the style. Then, it gives you a preview of its recommended changes to the writing style.
You can choose to either accept these changes, or go back and provide more feedback.
Advanced Mode
In this mode you'll find 17 different settings you can adjust to customize the way Subscribr writes.:
- Emotional Expression Rate: How much feeling and mood the writing conveys. "Medium" means it balances factual information with emotional moments.
- Narrative Storytelling Techniques: The methods used to tell the story. Examples:
- Chronological narrative = telling events in time order
- Biographical details = facts about someone's life
- Historical context = background information about the time period
- Personal anecdotes = short, interesting stories about real events
- Direct quotes = using someone's exact words
- Style: The overall approach to writing. "Informative, conversational" means it teaches while keeping the tone casual and less formal.
- Tone: The writer's attitude. "Authoritative but playful" means it's knowledgeable but not too serious.
- Average Paragraph Length: The typical number of words in each paragraph, which can be used to indicate the complexity of the content.
- Common Phrases: Stock phrases the writer tends to use repeatedly.
- Complexity: How hard the writing is to understand. "Low" means it's fairly simple.
- Burstiness Rate: How the writing varies between simple and complex passages. "Medium" means moderate variation.
- Sentence Length Distribution: The mix of different sentence lengths, which can indicate how "choppy" the writing is.
- Average Sentence Length: Typical number of words per sentence.
- Common Words Rate: How often basic, everyday words are used versus fancy ones.
- Words over 3 Syllables: Number of longer words per 200 words, which can hint at the complexity of the language used.
- General Type: The overall category of writing.
- Narrative Perspective: Who's telling the story.
- Vocabulary Level: The difficulty of words used.
- Reading Grade Level: How educated a reader needs to be to understand it - for examplegrade 6 means most adults can follow it easily.
Plus, with Custom Instructions, you can fine-tune your Channel Voice to perfection. The possibilities are endless.
Top 5 tips for customizing your Channel Voice:
- If the writing is too complex or formal: adjust the vocabulary, reading grade level, and complexity. For many YouTube channels, using very simple vocabulary with a reading grade level of 6 and very low word complexity is ideal in order to make the content easy for viewers to understand.
- If the writing sounds too forced: especially with phrases like "buckle up" or "here's where it gets interesting," this could be a sign that the tone needs some refinement. In general, AIs tend to go overboard when asked to write in certain tones like "motivational" or "engaging". Similarly, you can avoid phrases like "picture this" or "imagine this" by removing references to "vivid descriptions" in the narrative techniques, or "engaging" in the tone. Try removing these references from your channel voice to see if it helps.
- The Narrative Techniques are an especially powerful way of achieving a great writing style that doesn't sound too forced. For instance, instead of a motivational tone, you could try adding a narrative technique like "success stories" which is inherently motivational for viewers. In this case, make sure to provide success stories in your research so Subscribr can give accurate examples.
- Use the Custom Instructions when you've tried adjusting the other settings but haven't been able to achieve your desired results. Keep in mind that examples on what TO do typically work much better than descriptions of what NOT to do. Instead of an instruction like "Never use the phrase 'buckle up'", a more effective instruction would be "Avoid hook phrases like 'buckle up'. Instead write using natural transitions and conversational storytelling, connecting each point through specific examples."
- Do not include instructions about the structure of your script. For example, "make sure to re-hook the viewer throughout the script." is not necessary because Subscribr already incorporates elements like hooks and curiosity gaps. If you have specific instructions about the structure of your script, you can include them in the Topic field when creating your script. However, instructions related to engagement, hooks, or curiosity gaps are never recommended.
Experimenting With Different Voices
And that's not all – you can create as many Channel Voices as you need. Your voices can be based on either your own writing samples or the style of any YouTube channel.
To create a new voice, simply click Add Voice from the dropdown menu.
If you're launching a new channel, this is an incredible way to model a winning formula from a successful channel right from the start.
Testing Your New Channel Voice
While the Preview box on the Channel Voice pages gives you a quick preview of what the new writing style will sound like, there is no substitute for testing it in a real script.
To test your new voice, visit the Draft step of your script and find the "Plan" tab of any script section. Then select your new voice in the dropdown menu. Finally, click Generate Draft to see the new writing style in action.
Note: for best results, skip section 1 and instead test your new voice with section 2. This is because section 1 is shorter and laser focused on the opening hook.
To use a specific voice when writing a new script, just select it from the dropdown menu on the Create Script page:
You can also set your new voice as the default by visiting your Settings page:
