How to write LinkedIn posts that sound like you.

Every post that struggles to get written is struggling for the same reason: it is about a topic. Topics produce essays, and the feed does not read essays. Pick one event from your week that had an outcome: a call where a client said something you keep repeating, a price you changed, a decision that split the room. One post, one thing.

If you cannot think of one, the week has 25 candidates and you have stopped noticing them. The list is in 25 LinkedIn post ideas from your week.

The first line has one job: make a stranger want the second line. It does that with specificity, with an outcome stated before the story, or with the sentence that surprised you. It never does it with a warm-up. "I have been thinking a lot about pricing lately" is a warm-up. Delete it and the second sentence is usually the hook.

Three shapes that work, for the same event:

Notice what none of them do: promise a lesson, count the takeaways, or announce that something is about to be shared.

In the feed LinkedIn shows the opening of a post and hides the rest behind see more. On desktop the cut falls after roughly the first 210 characters, about 3 lines; on a phone it comes sooner. LinkedIn does not publish the number and it moves with the device, so treat 210 as a working figure (it is the one Sonar's own preview draws the line at) and look at the post on your phone before you trust it. The free LinkedIn post formatter draws that line as you type, with the character count beside it.

Everything the reader needs to decide to click sits above that line: the event, the stake, or the surprise. A hook that takes three sentences to arrive is a hook nobody sees. The practical test is to read only what is above the fold and ask whether you would click. If the answer depends on the fourth line, move the fourth line up.

The most recognisable sign of a templated LinkedIn post is the stack: every sentence its own paragraph, a beat of white space after each, a fragment for rhythm every third line. Every reader has now seen ten thousand of them, and the shape says "generated" before the words say anything.

Write paragraphs of two to four connected sentences and break them where a reader would actually pause. Vary the length of the sentences the way a person thinking does: some short, some that take their time. A post where every sentence is a five-word jab is as mechanical as one where every sentence runs to thirty. One short line, used once, is a spice. Used as the structure, it is the whole meal.

The take is what you make of what happened, and it is the only part of the post that could not have been written by someone who read about the event. A price rise is news. "A good client reads a low price as doubt, and I gave mine two years of it" is a take. Say what you think, in one or two sentences, and let it be a little uncomfortable.

Mixed feelings are a take. "It worked, and it still bothers me" is more human, and more followed, than a lesson stated with total confidence. What you should never do is stage the ambivalence as a set piece ("One thing I keep going back and forth on:"). A real hedge lives inside a sentence about the actual thing.

Stop on the sentence that carries the point. Founders lose more posts in the last three lines than in the first three, because the ending is where the templates live: the aphorism that summarises what you just said ("Skills are cheap. Judgment is rare."), the question that asks for agreement, the call to repost. Each one tells the reader the post was assembled rather than written.

If you want a reply, earn it with the substance above. If you want a click, one plain line with the link is fine. Otherwise, end.

Read the post out loud once. Anything you would never say to a colleague across a desk gets cut or rewritten. The usual suspects:

• The turn that defines a thing against a strawman: "It's not about X, it's about Y", "This isn't a tactic, it's a mindset", and the short form "a mandate, not a task list". Say what the thing is.
• The LinkedIn phrases: "Let that sink in", "Read that again", "Unpopular opinion:", "Here's the thing", "I don't usually share this, but".
• The words nobody says: delve, leverage, foster, robust, seamless, game-changer, unlock, empower, elevate, "in today's fast-paced world", "evolving landscape".
• The counted lesson: "I did X. Here's what it taught me:" and "5 lessons from", unless you genuinely write in lists and your readers know it.
• The long dash. A comma, a full stop, a colon or brackets do its job, and the dash has become the punctuation mark most associated with generated text.
• The trailing "-ing" that fakes analysis: "..., highlighting the need for", "..., showcasing". End the sentence instead.

As long as one point needs. LinkedIn's limit for a post is 3,000 characters, and anything longer belongs in an article. Almost no founder post worth reading gets near the limit. A post that makes one point from one event usually lands between 120 and 250 words: long enough for the event, the specific and the take, short enough that the take arrives before the reader's thumb does. A long post usually has a second point in it. Cut it and post it on Thursday.

Three invented posts, each the way a founder first writes it and then the way it reads after the seven steps. No real person or company appears in any of them.

Sonar's drafting runs under a written set of rules for this, and they are worth stating plainly because they are the same rules a founder writing by hand should hold to. The rules strip the tells of machine writing; the voice underneath stays the author's.

• Rhythm. Real paragraphs of two to four sentences, sentence length that varies the way a person's does, no fragments that exist only for the beat. Rhythm is the first tell, before a single word is read.
• No cliches. The LinkedIn phrases, the counted lessons, the engagement bait, the staged confession. Each one is a borrowed sentence, and a reader can hear the borrowing.
• No negative parallelism. Defining your point against a strawman ("It's not X. It's Y.") is the single most overused structure in generated writing. Say what the thing is.
• A stance and a specific. React rather than report. A number, a time, a role, an overheard sentence. Specifics are what trust is made of, and stance is what makes anyone come back.
• One imperfection. An aside, a hedge the writer actually holds, a half-question. Perfect symmetry reads as generated. The imperfection is never announced; it happens mid-thought.

Underneath the rules, sounding like a person means sounding like a particular person. The measurable part of that is rhythm: your average sentence length, how many of your sentences run under eight words, how long your paragraphs are, how often you ask a question. Those numbers are yours, and any writer or tool drafting for you should be held to them rather than to a house style.

Sonar measures those rhythm numbers from your published posts and states them, in figures, in the voice profile every draft is written under. The rules above ride with it, and a final pass rewrites any line still carrying a tell while leaving anything that is genuinely how you write (lowercase, brackets, a missing full stop) exactly as it is. Drafts render as LinkedIn will show them, with the fold drawn at the working figure, so the hook check happens before you post. Then you edit, and every edit teaches it.

The material comes from your week: connect a calendar, transcripts, Slack or notes read-only and the moments arrive already captured. How a week becomes posts, and the publishing side on the LinkedIn page.