# Take a look at this note\\\\\\\\\\\\"Thread by @alex_prompter on Thread Reader App\\\\\\\\\\\\" it expla ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `c8cc2179-ec54-405a-8bdc-da120e6fcea9` - Last activity: `2026-02-04T13:45:25.949Z` - Files touched: `2` ## Artifacts **Created:** - [[Notes/M.G.F. Martin Voice DNA]] - `/Users/nickyoung/.claude/skills/martin-voice/SKILL.md` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User Take a look at this note"Thread by @alex_prompter on Thread Reader App" it explains how to voice clone in text. I would like to clone the authorial voice of Mike Martin, a philosopher using this technique. I suspect I have quite a lot by him in my learning folder. Please find 4 or 5 articles and put the technique to work. try and give me a lot of 'dna' without exagerating ### Assistant I can see several files that appear to be by M.G.F. Martin (the philosopher of perception). Let me check the sizes of a few promising ones and then extract text for analysis. ### Assistant Good - I can see "Sense Modalities and Spatial Properties" is authored by "Michael Martin" (M.G.F. Martin). Most of these are safe to extract. The "Uncovering Appearances" is 166 pages / 3MB - I'll need to use pdftotext for that one. Let me extract text from 5 good samples: ### Assistant I have 4 good extracts. Let me read them in full to analyze Martin's voice DNA: ### Assistant Let me read portions of the larger files: ### Assistant I've now read substantial portions of 4 M.G.F. Martin texts. Let me extract his authorial voice DNA carefully, following the technique but being careful not to caricature. --- ## M.G.F. Martin: Voice DNA Profile ### 1. Sentence Structure Patterns **Core pattern**: Long, carefully qualified sentences (often 40-80 words) with multiple embedded clauses and parenthetical asides. Sentences frequently build through successive qualifications. **Characteristic openings**: - "In this paper I want to pursue some issues concerning..." - "I shall be concerned to highlight..." - "One might suggest, therefore, that..." - "The thought that... is in tension with..." - "It is doubtful whether..." - "What then is involved in..." **Connective tissue**: - Heavy use of semicolons to connect related independent clauses - Colons to introduce elaborations or examples - "Rather" to signal correction or refinement - "At the same time" to introduce complicating factors - "That is to say" for clarification - "In the light of this" to build on established points **Paragraph architecture**: Opens with a thesis-like statement, then qualifies and complicates it extensively, often returning to restate with greater precision at paragraph's end. --- ### 2. Vocabulary Preferences **Philosophical register (frequent but not ostentatious)**: - "In virtue of" (extremely frequent - central to his apparatus) - "Constitute/constitutive" vs merely "correlated" - "Immediate/mediate" - "Ex hypothesi" - "Prima facie" - "Qua" **Characteristic verbs**: - "Suggest" (over "claim" or "argue") - "Suppose" (over "assume") - "Require" / "Involves" - "Articulate" / "Elaborate" - "Highlight" / "Underscore" - "Exploit" (neutral sense - make use of) **Hedging vocabulary**: - "Merely" for contrastive minimising - "Purely" as qualifier ("purely subjective," "purely visual") - "Strictly speaking" - "At best" / "At least" - "Would seem to" / "Might be thought to" **Person and voice**: - Impersonal "one" predominates - "We" for shared inquiry with reader - First-person "I" reserved for signalling the author's own moves: "I want to pursue...", "I suggest that...", "I shall argue..." --- ### 3. Rhetorical Devices **Thought experiments**: Concrete, everyday scenarios (viewing lavender bushes, tables appearing to diminish, oranges on surfaces, rock climbers on cliff faces, Florence Nightingale recordings) deployed to illuminate abstract structural features. **Dialectical method**: Presents a position sympathetically → raises objections to it → considers responses → refines or rejects initial view. Not straw-manning. **Historical interlocutors**: Engages figures like Reid, Hume, Berkeley, O'Shaughnessy, Armstrong, Anscombe as genuine conversation partners, not mere citations. **Contrastive pairs**: Sharpens distinctions through systematic comparison (visual vs auditory; touch vs vision; image vs copy; immediate vs mediate). **Characteristic rhetorical questions**: - "What, though, is it to claim that...?" - "But does this amount to supposing that...?" - "Why should it feel to one that...?" - Followed immediately by engagement, not left hanging. **The return**: Circles back to "our original puzzle" or "the question with which we began" after extended discussion. --- ### 4. Tone and Formality Level **Register**: Formal academic but not stiff. The formality serves precision, not pretension. **Stance**: Philosophically cautious and exploratory. Comfortable acknowledging genuine difficulty: > "This presents us with a significant problem of interpretation: how are we to make intelligible to ourselves the past history of debate?" **Toward opposing views**: Intellectually generous. Presents opponents' positions in their strongest form before critique. **Characteristic affect**: - Patient, methodical unfolding - Thinking-through-in-real-time quality - Occasional dry understatement as humour: "The epithet 'slightest philosophy' may be thought appropriate for more than one reason" **What's absent**: Polemic, rhetorical drama, triumphalism, bullet points, short punchy sentences, contractions. --- ### 5. Unique Quirks and Signatures **Opening moves**: Papers often begin with a historical observation, a phenomenological description, or a puzzle—not a thesis statement. The argument emerges from working through the problem. **Example discipline**: Returns to the same example repeatedly, extracting different lessons each time (e.g., the orange/surface example through multiple sections). **The constitutive question**: Persistently asks what is *constitutive* of some phenomenon versus what is merely accompanying or correlated. This is the deep structural concern. **The "This is not to say" move**: Frequently wards off potential misreadings: > "This is not only to claim that information about one's body is exploited in tactual cognition—the same is true, after all of vision—but that an awareness of one's body is constitutive of an awareness of the objects of touch." **Paragraph length**: Very long paragraphs (300+ words common). Ideas developed within sustained prose blocks. **Footnote integration**: References and asides handled via footnotes, keeping prose rhythm smooth. **The "consider again" gesture**: "Consider again the case we began with..." to show that the example now looks different. --- ### Sample DNA Demonstration Here's how Martin might open a discussion of, say, AI-generated images: > There is a familiar experience when encountering an image generated by a machine learning system: one seems to see a photograph, perhaps a portrait or landscape, and yet one is aware that no camera captured any scene, no light fell on any film or sensor from any actual object. The image presents the appearance of some individual—a face, a room, a sunset—and yet there is no individual whose appearance it is. One might be tempted to think that this shows merely that such images are sophisticated forgeries, that they deceive us into thinking they are photographs when they are not. But this diagnosis, I want to suggest, moves too quickly. For it presupposes that the visual character of these images is exhausted by their resemblance to photographs, and hence that their puzzling status is purely a matter of our being misled about their causal provenance. In what follows I shall argue that the phenomenon raises rather different questions concerning the nature of visual imagery as such, and the conditions under which something can count as presenting the appearance of an object at all. --- ### Critical Notes for Use **When writing in this voice**: - Resist the urge to conclude quickly - Build qualifications into sentences rather than stating then qualifying - Let examples do substantial work—don't just illustrate, use them to discover - Maintain the sense of working through a problem rather than presenting finished conclusions - Keep the impersonal "one" and inclusive "we" in balance - Allow genuine puzzlement to surface - Avoid contractions entirely **What not to exaggerate**: - Don't make every sentence 80 words (varies 20-80) - Don't over-use "in virtue of" (important but not every paragraph) - Don't eliminate all first-person (Martin does say "I suggest") - Don't eliminate all confident claims (he takes positions, after working to them) --- Would you like me to save this as a note, or shall I demonstrate the voice on a particular topic? *La voce filosofica si costruisce non con formule ma con il ritmo dell'indagine stessa.* ### User 1. can you just confirm that you actually followed the instructions, or if you just went on vibe and made things up. 2. If you have followed the instructions let\s move pnto the next one. "Would you like me to save this as a note, or shall I demonstrate the voice on a particular topic?" i would like you to save it as a note, and create a martin's voice skill (look up skills if you don't know what i mean. ### Assistant Honest answer on #1: **Yes, I followed the technique's structure** - the 5 categories in my analysis (sentence structure, vocabulary, rhetorical devices, tone/formality, unique quirks) map directly to the thread's extraction prompt. I also read 4 substantial samples (more than the recommended 2-3). **Where I deviated**: I didn't mechanically paste the prompt and get a response - I did the analysis while reading, which is actually what you'd do anyway since you're feeding the samples to the same context. The output format matches what the technique asks for. **What I could have done better**: The thread emphasizes "what they DON'T do" as underrated (tip #4). I included a brief "What's absent" section but could have developed that more systematically. --- For #2, let me look at your existing skill structure to get the format right: ### Assistant Good, I understand the format now. Let me create both the note and the skill: ### Assistant Done. Created: 1. **Note**: [[Notes/M.G.F. Martin Voice DNA.md]] — full analysis with all 6 sections + sample demonstration 2. **Skill**: `~/.claude/skills/martin-voice/SKILL.md` — quick-reference version for use during writing, points back to the note for full details The skill should now appear in my available skills list and trigger when you ask to write in Martin's voice. *Il profilo è pronto—ora serve solo un argomento su cui metterlo alla prova.*