Writing Style
Teach Byword to write exactly as you would
Byword gives you two different options for customising its writing style:
Manual writing styles Give Byword a description of how you'd like it to write, for example 'professional' or 'humorous'
Custom writing styles Provide Byword with one to three samples of a writing style you'd like to emulate, and have Byword write in that style
Manual writing styles
By default, all Byword accounts are set to use a manual writing style. If your account is in manual mode, you'll see a box like the below on your Settings page:
By default this will be set to 'Neutral', but you can customise it to suit your liking.
Please note the following when choosing a manual writing style:
Your writing style should be an adjective:
Good: professional, humorous, academic
Bad: you are writing to professionals, make jokes, you are an academic expert
Similarly, your writing style should be one word long.
Do not attempt to insert anything other than a writing style here. Don't ask for H4s, or for a word count, or anything like that.
Custom writing styles
Custom writing styles are an advanced feature which allow you to emulate a specific writing style in your content.
Heads up!
As an advanced feature, it's highly recommended to read the full documentation below prior to use.
On your settings page, you'll be able to switch to custom writing styles if they're not already enabled.
You'll then see an option to select a custom writing style or, if it's your first time, to create a custom writing style.
You'll then be brought to the custom writing style screen, and prompted to select or create your first custom style.
To get started with creating your first custom style, give it a name. This doesn't affect the writing process at all, and is only used to help you identify your styles in case you create multiple.
For the purposes of example, let's say we want to copy the writing style in this blog by Gary Vaynerchuk. We'll give our style a name, and copy-paste the body of that blog into the box below.
You might have noticed there's an option, next to the style name field, to increase the number of samples above 1. You can do this up to 3 samples, if you'd like to provide more content for Byword to learn from.
Should I provide multiple samples?
Byword will essentially average the writing style across all samples provided. This means that if you provide more than 1 sample, Byword will try to incorporate elements of all samples into its style.
This is good when:
You don't have a single sample that's long enough for Byword to learn from (Byword likes to have at least 1,000 words in total to learn from).
You want to write in a style that's essentially a mid-point across multiple different samples.
More samples aren't necessarily better though. Often, 1 sample is perfectly good, especially when:
The 1 sample incorporates everything you want replicated in your writing style.
The 1 sample has decent lengthl; i.e. is over 1,000 words long.
Saving your style
Once you're good to go, you can hit Save Custom Style. You'll notice the following appear at the top of your page, as Byword starts to understand your writing style:
Once Byword has understood your style, it'll be ready to use, and look like the following:
Here you can edit or delete your style, as well as toggle whether it's enabled. If you have multiple styles, you can have at most one style (or none) enabled at any one time.
Whenever you write an article with a custom writing style enabled, your article will be written in a way that mirrors the samples you provided for that style. If you write an article with custom style mode enabled (on your settings page), but no specific styles enabled, then Byword will use a default style.
Limitations & FAQs
It's important to note that using a custom writing style comes with some limitations:
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