Teaching AI to Write Chinese

My blog had 83 Chinese posts — all of them read like translated English. Stiff, formal, academic. So I studied China's best WeChat writers, distilled their craft into a 435-line writing system, and fed it to Claude as a system prompt. Then I rewrote every single post. This is the story of that guide.

One style guide fixed translation-ese, but a tech review shouldn't sound like social commentary. Different content needs different voices. I developed a systematic method for 'stealing' any author's writing style — collecting articles, dissecting patterns, and extracting a structured Style Profile. Here's the full process, demonstrated with a real example.

A style library, no matter how large, can't cover everyone's taste. Some users want to write like an author who isn't in the library. Some want the voice of one specific article, not a generalized style. The solution: real-time style extraction. Give the AI any reference article, and it clones the writing DNA on the fly.