IANews
GuidesBriefs

Style and tone

Configure article tone, structure, and length for your briefs.

Style and tone

Configure the editorial voice, structure, and length of articles generated from your briefs. These settings shape how the IA writes -- from sentence style to section layout -- so your output matches your publication's identity.

Tone options

IANews supports five tones. Each one instructs the IA to adopt a specific writing style.

ToneStyleExample sentence
NeutralBalanced, factual reporting"The company reported a 15% increase in revenue for Q3."
AnalyticalDeep, data-driven analysis"The 15% revenue surge reflects broader market trends driven by AI adoption, which grew 40% year-over-year."
CasualConversational, friendly"So yeah, they basically crushed it -- 15% growth, and nobody saw it coming."
FormalProfessional, corporate"The organization demonstrated significant financial improvement, achieving a 15% increase in quarterly revenue."
JournalisticNews-style, inverted pyramid"Revenue jumped 15% in Q3, exceeding analyst expectations by three points, the company announced Thursday."

Journalistic tone combined with medium length works best for most news articles. It front-loads the key facts and reads naturally for a broad audience.

Article structure

The default article structure follows a four-section layout:

  1. Introduction -- Sets context, states the main news or thesis.
  2. Key developments -- Reports the core facts, events, and data points.
  3. Analysis -- Provides interpretation, expert perspectives, and implications.
  4. Conclusion -- Summarizes takeaways and looks ahead.

You can customize this structure per brief:

  • Rename sections -- Change "Key developments" to "What happened" or any label that fits your editorial style.
  • Add sections -- Insert additional sections like "Background", "Expert quotes", or "Market impact".
  • Remove sections -- Drop sections you do not need. A short news brief might only use Introduction and Key developments.
  • Reorder -- Drag sections to change their sequence.

Target length

Choose how long the generated article should be.

LengthWord countBest for
Short~500 wordsNews briefs, quick updates, breaking news
Medium~1,000 wordsStandard articles, daily coverage
Long~2,000 wordsIn-depth features, analysis pieces, weekly roundups

The IA treats this as a target, not a hard limit. Output may vary by 10-15% depending on the topic complexity and available source material.

Language

Select the output language from the 28 supported languages. The IA generates the entire article -- headline, body, and metadata -- in the chosen language.

Supported languages include: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, and Ukrainian.

Source material does not need to match the output language. IANews can ingest English sources and generate a French article, or vice versa. Cross-lingual retrieval is handled automatically.

Style guide integration

If your site has a style guide defined in Settings, every brief on that site inherits it by default. The style guide can specify:

  • Preferred tone -- Sets the default tone for new briefs.
  • Target word count -- Default length for articles.
  • Keywords -- Terms to emphasize or include naturally.
  • Forbidden words -- Terms the IA should avoid (competitors, informal slang, etc.).
  • Custom instructions -- Free-text editorial guidelines (e.g., "Always include a data table when discussing financial results").

You can override any inherited style guide setting on a per-brief basis. The brief-level setting takes precedence.

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