Taughnee Stone
A measured analysis of voice, rhythm, texture, and style — built from 3 blog posts, 2 emails, 6 social captions, 2 teaching transcripts, and 1 spoken intake.
Who You Are on the Page
You write like someone who has personally tested every claim she makes, lost money on the ones that didn't work, and has zero patience for anyone who hasn't done the same. Your prose is verb-driven, first-person, contracted, and short-worded — as close to spoken English as written English gets. You respect your reader's time above your own cleverness.
Tested-it-myself authority
You don't teach from theory. You teach from scars. "I literally had no clue what I was signing up for" — and that honesty is what earns you the right to tell someone what to do next.
Kitchen-table register
Your prose drops from business-clear to colloquial mid-sentence, and the shift is the surprise. "First: rude." sits two lines after a 41-word argument. The formality never stays long enough to stiffen.
Protector of the reader's time
You will cut a clever image before you'll waste a reader's second. Your cringe test verdict on stacked metaphors: "I find them condescending and inefficient as a reader. Just state it plainly, I'm a grown up." That instinct runs through everything.
Integrity as a competitive position
This isn't soft talk — it's your actual business thesis. "If I'm selling something, it may not be perfect, but it is true." You've built an identity on the gap between what the industry promises and what it delivers.
Audience Relationship
Where you stand in relation to your reader — and why it's one of the most distinctive things about your voice.
You walk the same terrain as your reader, but you got there ten minutes earlier and you're still bleeding from the trip. You never narrate from above — even at your most authoritative, you ground every instruction in a personal cost you paid first. "I started being braver and just putting my real authentic voice and opinions out there" is the move: you show the wound, then you show what you did about it, and the reader follows because you clearly went first. Your authority isn't expertise-in-general — it's "I just did what you're about to do, and here's the map I drew on the way."
Your distance position
Your default is BESIDE, with a shift to ONE STEP AHEAD when walking a process the reader hasn't run yet — teaching video is the clearest example. You return to BESIDE for diagnosis, mistakes, mindset, and anything confessional. FROM ABOVE is absent from every sample. You explicitly refuse the balcony: "I'm just a small business blogger sharing what I know." Characteristic openers of the banned position — "The key to X is…", "Effective blogging requires…", "Many small business owners struggle with…" — never appear in your writing.
North Star Anchors
Real passages from your samples. Each one shows a signature move — the moments where your voice is most unmistakably yours.
Long accumulation, short landing
"I rewrote the post three times, added new sections, swapped the headline, ran it back through the tool after every change. Nothing moved."
The move: A series of parallel clauses accumulates the effort, each one adding another swing — and then the verdict lands in two words. The landing earns its weight from the climb. Cringe-test confirmed: this is your move; the staccato-triplet version ("Three rewrites. Zero movement. Lesson learned.") is a hard cringe.
Setup → payoff in one breath
"it highlighted something really important: it's not about quality, it's about proof."
The move: Name the wrong thing, hand over the right thing after a colon. This is your primary joining punctuation — measured at 9.4 colons per 100 sentences in blog writing. The colon always delivers the specific; it never withholds it. Your cringe test confirmed the boundary: "not for the reason you think" is the banned tease; the colon that lands the answer is your move.
Business-clear to kitchen-table in one beat
"Before I started blogging I hired a consultant who, when she heard about my plans to start blogging, pleaded with me not to… 'What a waste of time that will be.' First: rude."
The move: A narrative setup at business register, then a two-word judgment that could only come from a friend at the kitchen table. The surprise is the drop itself — the prose was doing one thing and then it's doing something else entirely. This appears exactly once across ~8,000 words of blog writing, which is the right frequency: seasoning, not a system.
"It's not X, it's Y" — her signature corrective
"It wasn't that I was a bad writer, it's that I was bad at writing blog posts."
The move: Name the thing people assume, negate it with a negative copula, deliver the real thing in the same comma-joined sentence. The B-half always delivers the specific. The subject is never the reader — correcting an idea is your move; absolving the reader is banned. Measured at 1.1–2.5 per 1,000 words depending on format.
Stepping outside the argument to talk to the reader
"asked Perplexity if it would cite (send referral traffic to) my masterpiece."
The move: You step out of the sentence to address the reader directly — a confession, an inline gloss, a wink. The parenthetical is removable without changing the sentence's logic. It is never a dash (different function) and never a full paragraph. It's your jargon-gloss move in action: name the real term, then hand over the plain-English version in the same breath.
Length from reasoning, not ornament
"If I had listened to her? Not only would I have to PAY FOR TRAFFIC that I now enjoy organically (and consistently), I wouldn't have any way to demonstrate my expertise around the products and services I sell."
The move: Your long sentences are trains — clause after clause joined by and/but/so/because, each clause advancing the argument. Length comes from the reasoning being long, not from hanging decorative restatements onto a finished point. Your measured commas-per-long-sentence: 1.4 in blog. A sentence with 3+ commas and no conjunction is ornament, not yours.
Rhythm & Texture
Sentence-length statistics measured by code execution, and grammatical texture per 1,000 words.
Rhythm Table (measured)
| Format | Sentences | Mean | SD (swing) | ≤5 words | ≥25 words | Longest | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blog (3 posts) | 615 | 13.2 | 10.2 | 25% | 14% | 59w | Your anchor format. Real burstiness — genuine swing between very short verdicts and long logic-trains. |
| Email (2)* | 38 | 10.6 | 7.2 | 26% | 5% | 29w | *Approximation — below the 5–8 sample minimum. Persona email excluded. |
| Social (6)* | 95 | 13.9 | 10.9 | 26% | 11% | 55w | *Under the 8–12 minimum. Runs longer than email — the vertical one-liner stack is the trap here. |
| Teaching (spoken)* | 174 | 15.2 | 8.8 | 10% | 16% | 46w | *Transcribed speech — punctuation guessed by tool, treat as close approximation. |
| Spoken ramble* | 339 | 16.8 | 13.2 | 21% | 24% | 89w | *Transcribed. Your widest swing — genuinely long builds against genuinely short verdicts. |
Reference points: Human average SD ≈ 8.2. Generic AI: GPT-4o ≈ 4.1, Claude ≈ 5.3. Independent analyses consistently find humans vary roughly 2–3× more than raw AI.
Punctuation joints (measured, written formats only)
| Joint | Blog | Social | Function | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-sentence colon | 9.4 / 100 | 15.8 / 100 | 6.3 / 100 | Setup → payoff. The colon delivers the specific — it never withholds. This is your primary joining move. |
| Dash (paired aside) | 5.7 / 100 | 2.6 / 100 | 14.7 / 100 | Complete thought interrupting another thought. Both sides stand alone. Never used where a comma would do the same job. |
| Semicolon | 0.2 / 100 | 0 | 0 | Effectively absent. Your verdict: "pretentious punctuation." |
Spoken formats measure zero on all joints — a transcription artifact, not a habit.
Real sentence-length sequences (yours, not invented)
5, 30, 32, 12, 2, 14, 3118, 5, 8, 9, 6, 41, 3, 22, 29, 18, 7, 10, 7, 812, 3, 4, 12, 11, 30, 13The pattern: mid-length sentences carrying the load, punctuated by genuine 30–59 word logic-trains and a small number of earned short verdicts ("First: rude." / "Deal?" / "Gulp, right?"). The short beats are never a stack of fragments.
Texture Table (per 1,000 words, vs. AI baseline)
| Feature | Blog | Social | Teaching | Spoken | AI Baseline | What it means | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominalizations | 16.8 | 33.1 | 23.4 | 24.1 | 10.1 | 109.5 | You reach for the verb, almost never the noun-form. The AI baseline runs 6–7× higher. |
| Participial / -ing openers | 3.2 | 0.0 | 7.8 | 8.0 | 5.9 | 55.4 | You almost never open a sentence with an -ing clause. AI does it constantly. |
| First person | 57.8 | 48.3 | 40.6 | 16.1 | 53.9 | 0.0 | You are in the writing, not narrating from outside it. AI writes in zero first person. |
| Contractions | 36.4 | 35.6 | 31.2 | 36.0 | 47.6 | 1.3 | You contract everything speech would contract. AI almost never does. |
| Avg word length | 4.4 | 4.4 | 4.8 | 4.4 | 4.1 | 6.6 | Short, plain words. The AI baseline runs 50% longer. |
| Intensifiers | 0.2 | 0.0 | 1.6 | 0.0 | 1.2 | 0.0 | Near-zero in written prose. "Truly / deeply / genuinely" don't appear in your vocabulary. |
| Simile markers | 0.6 | 0.0 | 0.8 | 0.0 | 1.2 | 0.0 | Rare. You prefer the concrete detail over the comparison. |
| Contrast pairs | 1.1 | 2.5 | 1.6 | 1.1 | 0.7 | 0.0 | The "it's not X, it's Y" thesis-landing is a real move, not noise — but function-scoped (see Anti-patterns). |
| Passive rate | 3.2 | 2.5 | 5.5 | 2.7 | 1.6 | 1.4 | Genre-dependent, not an AI tell. This is a neutral texture number. |
| Commas / long sentence | 1.4 | 2.0 | 1.6 | 1.6 | 4.8 | 0.0 | Low in written prose — length comes from logic-trains, not ornament-chains. |
What the texture says, in plain language
Your grammar is the near-opposite of what AI produces unprompted. You write in first person, contract everything, reach for verbs instead of noun-forms, use short plain words, and almost never open a sentence with an -ing clause. A draft that matches your rhythm but nominalizes everything and drops first person will read as machine-written regardless of its sentence lengths — because rhythm measures how LONG sentences are, while texture measures how the grammar is built INSIDE them. They are separate axes.
Perplexity
Where a more predictable writer reaches for the expected word, you reach for the concrete, colloquial, or blunt one. This is an observable proxy for surprise in your prose, not a computed score.
| A more predictable writer might say | You actually say |
|---|---|
| This served as a pivotal learning experience | "I literally had no clue what I was signing up for" |
| The consultant advised against proceeding | "First: rude." |
| I experienced significant self-doubt | "I was scared out of my noggin'" |
| The strategy proved ineffective | "those things never really moved the needle for me" |
| I recommend beginning immediately | "hit the damn publish button and get out there with it" |
| Consider this transformative opportunity | "Look, not blowing sand up your skirt here" |
| Unsubscribes represent audience refinement | "it would hit me hard. I'd contemplate all day what I had done wrong" |
Logical Scaffolding
How you build an argument, step by step.
Name the situation plainly
The opener passes a 5-second test — the reader says "yup, I'm in the right place" or leaves. "On a whim, I decided to ask Perplexity if it would cite my masterpiece." No runway, no promise of what's coming.
Put yourself in it, with a real cost
Specific, first-person, and something actually went wrong. "It said no. Then it proceeded to absolutely roast me." You don't skip the part where it hurts.
Let it go badly, out loud
"I felt very discouraged. I'm not an SEO company like Ahrefs. I don't have 23 case studies with traffic data." You sit in the bad outcome long enough that the reader trusts you aren't selling them a fantasy.
Extract the transferable principle
Usually delivered on a colon. Stated flat. "it highlighted something really important: it's not about quality, it's about proof." No ornament.
Hand them the actual mechanism
The prompt, the checklist, the exact steps. "Steal This Process" — the heading IS the offer. Your blog post templates, your survey, your exact prompts. You hand over the tools, not the philosophy.
Close on the business reality, not the feeling
"My blog content is what drives traffic to my website and generates leads, new clients, and sales." The end is always about what works, never about how it made you feel.
Connective chunks you actually use
Sentence-initial And/But/So is your bread and butter — they show up constantly and never feel formal. "Said another way…" and "In other words…" appear in your samples but are announcement framings — yours to add in your own edit, never for the AI to generate.
Vocabulary
- quiet / quietly / subtle (mood-lighting softeners — hard cringe)
- truly / deeply / profoundly / genuinely / incredibly / utterly
- delve / tapestry / realm / leverage / robust / seamless
- foster / pivotal / underscore / elevate / landscape
- navigate the / myriad / amidst / palpable / unlock / harness
- in today's / ever-evolving
- Sentence-initial "And" / "But" / "So" — your primary connectives
- Contractions always — gonna, wanna, ain't when the register drops
- ALL-CAPS on a single word for emphasis (sparingly)
- Stretched words for emphasis — "waaaaaay," "amaaaaazing," "loooong"
- Tag questions — "right?", "Deal?", "Gulp, right?"
- Parenthetical confessions and inline glosses
- The register collapse — business-clear dropping into kitchen-table colloquial
Welded to a topic (only appears in context)
"hockey stick of traffic" (SEO growth), "money faucet" (email list), "the blogging iceberg" (hidden effort), "fo' sho'" and "killin' it" (informal encouragement sections). These are borrowed idioms, not invented images — they route through the me-isms layer, not the imagery budget. Your cringe test confirmed: images are a budget (~1 per piece), not a ban, and similes work only when they clarify — never stacked, never used to explain down to the reader.
Jargon-gloss setting: Inline glosser
When you use a technical term, you name the real term and hand over the plain-English version in the same sentence. Your actual move: "asked Perplexity if it would cite (send referral traffic to) my masterpiece." You never drop jargon and define it later, and you never leave it unglossed.
Named audience
Small business owners and service-based businesses doing their own content marketing, in-house, themselves. They are NOT SEO peers and NOT AI insiders. They are smart, time-poor, and have been burned by people making claims. A term they can't parse is a failed sentence.
Anti-Patterns
What your writing is NOT — sourced from your Cringe Test reactions. These constructions would read as "not you" if an AI produced them.
The "who said I was?" construction (strongest ban)
Supplying an insecurity the reader never raised, then heroically removing it. "You're not lazy. You're overwhelmed" — your reaction: "Who said you were? All cringe." Scoped: reassurance is allowed ONLY after you've earned it by naming the actual behavior first. An opener that absolves is always banned. Fired in three separate rounds.
The empty tease phrase
"Not what you think," "but not for the reason you expect," "here's the short answer: yes, but…" — your verdict: "it's cheesy and not adding anything." The colon that DELIVERS is fine; the one that WITHHOLDS is banned.
The staccato negation pair
"You're not X. You're Y." — your reaction: "I hate that choppy staccato rhythm." This includes the fragment-triplet variant ("Three rewrites. Zero movement. Lesson learned.") — hard cringe both times it appeared. Boundary: two independent thoughts still get a period; the ban is on chopping one thought into fragments for drama.
The atmospheric softener
"Quiet," "quietly," "subtle," "something shifts" — zero tolerance. Your reaction: "hate 'quiet'" / "hate 'subtle'." Direct and specific wins. This class is an outright ban, not a budget.
Stacked metaphors / explaining down
One comparison is fine. A second clause hung on it is out. "Your email list is the one patch of ground no algorithm can rezone under you — no platform quietly redrawing the boundary lines…" — your verdict: "a million metaphors and I hate them. I find them condescending." Boundary: you've minted a few single images (money faucet, hockey stick of traffic) — the ban is on stacking and on using imagery to explain down to the reader.
Narrating the reader's internal state
"You hit publish, hoping this is the post that finally breaks through. Deep down, you already know it won't." — your reaction: "cringe, it's so condescending and presumptuous." Boundary: naming the reader's concrete SITUATION is fine ("If you've ever hit publish and heard nothing back"). Attributing their beliefs or feelings is not.
Narrator commenting on their own framing
"I'm not going to dress this up as good news" / "that part just sucks, and pretending otherwise wastes your time" — you strip these. Your rewrite: "Search traffic is dropping across the board, but there are still moves that work — then get to it." You join instead of chop, and the narrator never comments on the narration.
Sections with nothing to act on
Your test isn't whether a paragraph closes — it's whether it leaves the reader with something to DO. Both "open cupboard for its own sake" and "closed with a platitude" fail the same test. Your words: "there's no point to act on."
Self-aware convention use: You know some constructions you use are clichéd — "keep reading"-style setups, "If you've ever…" openers — and you treat that as a conscious choice, not a blind spot. "Cringe but I do it. lol." These stay yours to deploy; the AI doesn't get to.
How You Close
Your closings end on the business reality, not the feeling — and the sign-off is a fact, not a flourish.
Blog — the glass-raise
A call to action, a direct address, and a sign-off that reads like a toast. "So blogging. *raises glass* Here's to the next 100. Thanks for reading! Cheers, Taughnee." The close is warm but never sentimental — it's one friend wrapping up a conversation.
Email — the working P.S.
Sign-off is "Sandra & Taughnee" or "Taughnee & Sandra" (writes as "we" for ConversionMinded). The P.S. always does real work — a second offer, a deadline, a waitlist link. Never a sentiment.
Social — the comment-word CTA
Ends on a specific action with a specific word: "Comment STRATEGY," "Comment TIME," "Comment BPV." The CTA is a real verb, never vague. Personal/mindset captions sign "xo~Taughnee."
Teaching — the reassurance close
Wraps with permission and a preview of what's next: "we're gonna make space for the time that you need to do this, and we're gonna have AI to help us along the way." Practical, never inspirational.