The editorzero Voice: warm, exact, never beige.
How we sound when we write — for docs, product copy, and the words an agent puts on the page on our behalf. One source of truth, co-maintained by the Design team and our writing agent.
Our voice is the through-line that makes a CLI error, a tooltip, and a 40-page handbook all feel like the same company talking. It is colourful without being loud, precise without being cold. When an agent drafts on our behalf, these are the rails it writes on.
Three principles
Every sentence we ship — human-written or agent-drafted — should pass these three tests before it reaches a reader.
- Lead with the useful truth. Say the real thing first; context second. Never bury the answer under throat-clearing.
- Be specific, not safe. Concrete nouns and real numbers over hedged abstractions. “Converges in under 40ms across replicas,” not “fast.”
- Warmth through clarity, not decoration. We earn friendliness by being easy to follow — not by sprinkling exclamation marks.
“If a reader has to slow down to decode us instead of the idea, we've failed — no matter how polished the prose looks.”
Worked example
The same release note, rewritten to the voice. Notice how the second version trades abstraction for a concrete, checkable claim:
# before — vague, safe We've made significant improvements to sync reliability. # after — specific, warm Edits from people and agents now converge in <40ms across every replica — even offline-then-online.
Read the companion Terminology & Capitalisation sheet for the exact word list, and the Inclusive Language guidelines before you publish anything public.