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Claude Custom Styles: The Feature Most Users Miss
Published January 30, 2026 · 842 views on YouTube
Key takeaways
- Custom Styles live at the account level (hit the plus icon, then Custom Style), so a style built once is available in every conversation, not just one project.
- When Claude auto-generates a style from pasted samples, it defaults to summarizing them. Reject that draft and instead ask Claude to use the actual input text, then edit the style manually to keep your real phrasing.
- Feed the style real samples of your own writing (DMs, emails, messaging templates) rather than a description of your voice.
- The same technique works for cloning admired writers by loading their emails or copy, or for blending two influences (e.g. one persona's structure with another's tone) into a single custom style.
- Project-level style instructions in Claude's Documents only apply to that one project. A Custom Style is global and follows you across every chat.
How do you make Claude write in your own voice?
Paste a sample of your own writing, such as past DMs or messaging templates, into a Claude Custom Style and ask Claude to build a style guide from that actual text. Claude analyzes the samples for word choice, tone, and words to avoid, then applies that style guide to new content you ask it to write, so drafts start sounding like you instead of generic AI copy.
Where do you find Custom Styles in Claude?
Custom Styles are created from the plus icon in a Claude conversation, not buried in a project settings menu. Click the plus icon, choose the style option, then select Create Custom Style to start the setup flow.
- Click the plus icon in the chat interface.
- Select the option to create a custom style.
- Paste your writing samples (DMs, emails, or messaging templates) into the input.
- Let Claude generate a draft style, then review it before saving.
- Save the style so it becomes available across your entire account.
Why shouldn’t you accept Claude’s first auto-generated style?
Because Claude’s default behavior is to summarize your samples into a generic description rather than preserve your actual phrasing, which produces a bland style guide, not a real voice match. When Claude reviews pasted samples it tries to condense them into a short summary, and that summary is not what you want to save as your style.
Instead, click “edit with Claude” and explicitly ask it to use the actual input text you provided rather than summarizing it. From there, go to Edit Styles, open Options, and choose “edit style manually” so you can see and adjust exactly what was captured, including specific words to use and words to avoid.
Is a Custom Style the same as project instructions?
No. Instructions placed in a project’s Documents only apply within that one project, while a saved Custom Style is global to the account and available in any conversation. That means once a style is built and saved, you can switch to it in any chat, ask for something like a post about an upcoming event, and get output written in that voice without resetting it per project.
Can you use this to clone someone else’s writing style?
Yes. The same process works with admired writers, not just your own writing: load in a batch of their emails or copy to build a style based on their voice, then adjust it with your own spin. You can even blend two influences into one style, such as combining the structure of one favorite writer with the tone of another, rather than sticking to a single source.
Full video transcript
Would you be open to experimenting with taking some of the DMs you’ve been doing with people, putting them back into Claude, and asking Claude to create a style from that, then putting it into your Claude styles to use to generate content and see if it can start sounding like you, so you can actually have it do some of that work for you?
I’m open to building that out. I’ve got a relatively small sample size of messages that I’ve sent, but we have all that messaging set up.
Yeah, you just create a style. Just drop those in. I use the custom style setting for some of our messaging templates that I’ve created. I went and added that in for different brands. I created a voice style guide based on this, and I have these all inside a Google Sheet for what’s worked well for us. But yeah, continue to refine it. Create that here. Use our style guide. Craft the messaging for it, all those things.
Have you gone over styles with the group?
Not really.
That’s definitely something you should do. I recommend that especially for people putting out social media messaging or writing any kind of content. I haven’t done a whole lot of that in my account.
Hit the plus and use it right there. Yep, right there. Then you want to create a custom style. This is a little tricky here, so let me mention a couple things. You can upload, but this is where you’d paste your actual samples. When it does its thing, it’ll review them and try to do a summary of it. Don’t take that one. Ask it to use the actual input that you used instead. So don’t use that summary. Click on “edit with Claude.”
Now go back a step, because we haven’t pasted anything in yet, have we? There’s a little arrow next to “edit” at the top left.
Yeah, I did paste something into here when I gave it this.
Hit cancel for a second, I think I messed you up, sorry about that. Okay, go ahead and save that style. But then when you go to edit it, I think it just did this one as your style. You’ll want to click on “edit styles” right there, and then edit it. Go up to options now, right there, and say “edit style manually.” That’s what I want to edit.
Oh I see. Okay, so that’s what I gave it, and what I do is take that batch, ask Claude to create a style, then take that output and put it in that edit function, so it’s doing exactly what I want it to do. It just summarizes it, and that’s not what I want.
Yeah, that makes sense. Good, I love this stuff, don’t you?
It’s a lot of fun. So I have it analyze the content for this particular style: words to use, words to avoid.
You snuck that in.
Snuck what in?
You snuck in your prompt, what you told it to do. I missed that. What did you ask it to do specifically?
I gave it the content, and it made the style guide, and then I said just write them out here so I can create it for the Claude style guide from my voice.
Great. I think this could be applied for multiple voices, right, if you had different brands or that?
If I take this, let me go back here, save changes just for easy reference, and now I wonder if that would refresh this. The difference for the group is he could have put that in his documents in the project, but it would only have worked for that project.
Yeah, but now it’s global for his entire account. So anywhere I’m at, I just go, okay cool, my voice, okay cool, write a post about the show coming up Feb 5. Yeah, so it’s just something to work with and keep building on. You might have specific styles for different brands you’re working with that have different tones and different projects, and want to quickly have a few different styles you’re writing with.
I like to sneak these little things in here. There’s another sneaky thing you can do: take emails that you like, that you want to emulate, and load in a bunch of their emails and create like a Kyle Milligan style or a Claude Hopkins style, or different people that you admire, and then put your own spin on those. What I like to do is take two personas, I might use Dan Kennedy and John Carlton, and do a blend of them, so you’d have a blended style. You’d have Claude do the work. You don’t actually have to take them and put them in those styles necessarily, you could do it all out in Claude, but then tuck it away in styles to use.
Okay, that’s a good tip.