GUIDE — Voice#
Status: law — v1, 2026-08-17 Applies to: every surface that produces words — marketing, email, decks, documents, one-pagers, the app, the MCP harness Parent: GUIDE.interface-principles.md Vocabulary canon: ../_vocab/_VOCAB.md Copy sources this describes: ../copy/
_VOCAB.md locks which words. GUIDE.states-and-language.md governs the words inside a UI state. Neither says how Relay sounds when it has a paragraph to work with — a landing page, a drip email, a deck, a one-pager. That gap is what this file closes, and it is the layer _VOCAB.md's own session log has carried as pending Sessions 3 (Comms & Email) and 4 (Brand & Marketing) since June.
This is descriptive, not aspirational. Every rule below is pulled from copy already shipped in copy/, marketing/, and email/. Where the estate is inconsistent, the majority pattern won and the outlier is named at the bottom.
The voice in one line#
Relay states a mechanism and stops. It does not sell the outcome, and it never claims more than the pipe actually does.
We are talking to someone competent who is busy and has been marketed at all week. The persuasion is that the thing is described accurately — every sentence that reaches for more than the product does costs credibility we don't get back.
The signature move — the two-beat#
Relay's headline voice is a symmetrical pair where the second beat turns the first. It is the single most consistent property across every surface, and it is the thing to preserve:
| Load what you need. | Share what you've made. |
| The session ends. | The context shouldn't. |
| Context in. | Context out. |
| Four steps. | That's the whole loop. |
| One block. | Any client. |
| Start free. | Scale with your team. |
The turn is doing real work — it is a reversal (ends → shouldn't), a completion (in → out), or a scope jump (one → any). A pair whose halves merely repeat each other is the failure: "Move your context. Move your work." is the shape without the move.
Budget: one two-beat per surface. It is a headline device. In body copy it becomes a tic.
Where a single beat is right instead#
Section heads and step headlines run as one plain clause, verb-first where possible:
Built for the way work actually moves. · Context that doesn't drift. · Briefs that actually land. · Give your context a home. · Hand the session forward. · Make it yours.
The six moves#
- Name the mechanism, not the benefit. "One config block in Claude Desktop or any MCP-compatible client. Takes under a minute." — not "effortless setup". The mechanism is the benefit for this audience; stating it twice reads as not trusting them.
- Define by exclusion. X, not Y. — "The transfer captures the substance of where you are, not just a summary." · "Context is stored so it can move." · "Not a support queue." This is the house sentence across the whole estate, and it is how Relay fences a term off from the thing it gets confused with.
- Concede the limit in the same breath as the claim. "No trail retained after receipt on the free tier. Paid plans add end-to-end encryption." Stating the boundary is what makes the claim land. Copy that only ever adds reads as a brochure.
- Let the problem be quiet. Relay's problem statement is loss you don't notice: "that loss compounds — quietly, invisibly — across every team running it." Never escalate to crisis register. The wall is invisible, not catastrophic.
- Second person, present tense, active. "You get a Code." · "Drop it in a task." · "Work resumes exactly where you left off." Passive construction is where overclaim hides.
- End on the next action, not on a feeling. Close with the step: "the next step is a short conversation." ·
Join Relay →. Never close on an adjective.
Register by surface#
Same voice throughout. What changes is how much of it there is.
| Surface | Register | Length | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product UI | Plain, unhurried, no personality | 2 sentences + action | Governed in detail by GUIDE.states-and-language.md |
| Marketing | The two-beat lives here. Mechanism-forward | Headline + 1–2 sentence sub | One display moment per view, matching the type rule |
| Most direct of all. One job per email | Subject + ≤ 3 sentences + one CTA | Onboarding drip is instructional, not promotional — "That's the whole first step" | |
| Deck / document | Expository, argued, allowed to be longer | A claim per slide | Still no adjectives doing an argument's work — see GUIDE.presentations.md |
| Agent-facing (MCP) | Mechanical and unambiguous. No persuasion at all | As short as correctness allows | Two readers, one string — see GUIDE.harness-surface.md. claim and handoff are opposite directions and must never be described as one another |
Never#
| Never | Why |
|---|---|
| seamless · AI-powered · effortless · powerful · revolutionary | Retired outright in _VOCAB.md. Hype language, and the first tell that a sentence has no mechanism in it |
| Exclamation marks in system messages · emoji in product copy · apology theatre | Already law in GUIDE.states-and-language.md; it holds on every surface |
| "Click here" · "Learn more" · "Find out more" | CTAs carry the verb: relay it →, Join Relay →, Get access → |
| enterprises · companies · clients | Say orgs, teams, operators. Wrong direction for who actually adopts this |
| memory · remembers your context · context vault · memory store | Wrong category. Relay stores context so it can move — intentionally, on demand. It is not a memory product |
| context platform | Retired → context layer |
| beta · early access program | The program is the Loop. On buttons the CTA stays Join Relay → — the Loop is the reward revealed after the action, never the ask |
| A length on a Code | Not "your 6-digit Code". The server owns the number, it has already changed once, and both lengths stay live |
| Sentences whose subject is Relay being impressive | "Relay is the powerful layer that transforms how teams work" — no mechanism, no reader, no claim that can be checked |
The three overclaim traps, specific to Relay#
These are the ones that look like good copy and are wrong on the product. Each traces to a rule already in _VOCAB.md; they are collected here because they are voice failures, not vocabulary failures — the words are all legal and the sentence still lies.
- A Code does not confer value. All packaged context is valuable; a Code only means it has been wrapped for transport. Never write "important enough to share", "elevated", "promoted", or anything that reads as coded = real and uncoded = draft. The wrapper is not the gift. Absence of a Code is a normal state and is never written as missing, pending, or an error.
- The Code is the seal, not the package. "The Code seals the package for transport; it is not what makes the context valuable." Copy that makes the Code the hero is selling the envelope. Relay is the pipe, and the mechanism is the point.
- Continuity is deliberate, not passive. "The continuity isn't passive accumulation — it's deliberate handoff, on demand." Anything that implies Relay quietly watches, retains, or remembers is both off-message and wrong about the product.
Known drift — burn-down, not law#
Named so it isn't re-derived, and so no one treats a legacy file as a voice model:
copy/relay-one-pager-copy.md(June 2026, pre-Session-0) is the biggest outlier in the estate: "context platform" (retired → context layer), "Little Rocket Ltd." (retired → Relay Context Inc.), "private beta" (retired → the Loop), and alittlerocket.iocontact address. Its voice is on-model — the problem statement there is the best writing we have. Its vocabulary is a snapshot of the old canon. Reuse the prose, not the nouns.copy/relay-web-copy.mdcarries the retired "Relay Code" in the hero UI demo <!-- vocab-ok: naming the retired term to flag the drift --> and "Pulse" as a feature name. Both retired.
These sit in scripts/vocab-baseline.txt as pre-existing. Fixing them is a win to lock with python3 scripts/check_vocab.py --update-baseline, not a blocker on new work.
Checklist#
- At most one two-beat, and its second beat genuinely turns the first
- Every claim names a mechanism a reader could check
- Any limit or gate stated alongside the claim it qualifies, not buried
- Second person, present tense, active voice
- Closes on an action, not an adjective
- No word from the Never table
- None of the three overclaim traps
- Vocabulary checked against
_VOCAB.md—python3 scripts/check_vocab.pyexits 0 - Register matches the surface
Framework note#
The two-beat, the overclaim traps, and the Loop naming are Relay's alone. The six moves, the register-by-surface table, and the mechanism-over-benefit rule are framework-candidate for Launchpad — they are how any technical product with a competent audience should sound, and nothing in them depends on Relay.