The Consistency Check: Auditing Copy Against Voice Pillars

Marketing Academy · Field Work●Copywriting

MiniAudit· 25 minutes

Squarespace

Objective: Given 5 real-style copy samples from different channels, score each against a brand's voice pillars and contrast statements to spot where voice breaks down.

You're a junior copywriter at Squarespace reviewing five pieces of copy pulled from the last quarter, an ad, an email subject line, a support chat reply, a blog intro, and a social caption, to check whether they actually sound like the same brand.

Apply the 'we are X, not Y' contrast-statement test to catch inconsistency that a normal proofread misses.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Docs

FreeScore copy samples against pillar contrast statements

Free, easy commenting for flags

The process

1 step

Step 01 of 01

Applying voice pillar contrast statements to real copy

The lesson's Step 1 defines voice pillars as 3-4 adjectives paired with a 'we are X, not Y' contrast statement, a vague adjective like 'friendly' means nothing without the contrast.

Squarespace's stated pillar is 'confident, not arrogant.' Which of these 5 samples fails that test?

Google Docs— Paste all 5 copy samples into one doc, add a scoring column next to each.

Procedure

Paste the 5 samples into a Google Doc, one per row
Score each sample 1-5 against the 'confident, not arrogant' contrast statement
Flag any sample scoring 2 or below and write the specific phrase that broke the pillar

Sample output

SAMPLE 3 (support chat reply): 'Obviously you just need to check your billing settings, that's pretty basic.'
Score: 1/5
Flag: 'Obviously' and 'pretty basic' read as arrogant, not confident. Violates pillar.

Healthy

4 of 5 samples score 4+ and the one flagged sample gets rewritten before publishing.

Unhealthy

All 5 samples get approved because nobody actually re-reads them against the pillar, just against a spell-checker.

What this means

A voice pillar without a scoring pass against real copy is decoration, not governance.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
Support chat replies keep sounding harsher than the brand's ads	Add the contrast-statement scoring pass to the support team's QA checklist, not just marketing's	30 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

A scored table of 5 copy samples with the lowest-scoring sample rewritten to match the voice pillar.

See a reference example

Sample output

Chewy voice audit (excerpt)

SAMPLE: Email subject line - 'Your order shipped! 📦'
Pillar: warm, not saccharine
Score: 5/5

SAMPLE: Paid ad headline - 'INSANE savings you can't miss!!!'
Score: 2/5 — 'INSANE' and the triple exclamation break the calm-confidence pillar.

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

Correctly scores all 5 samples using the contrast-statement test
Identifies the specific phrase that breaks the pillar in flagged samples