# Copywriting prose creator Human Guide

## What This Is For
Provides prose engineer. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for content production: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the Copywriting prose creator agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for copywriting prose creator.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the Copywriting prose creator guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- **BUILD** — fresh PROSE.md from SOUL.md + TONE.md + discovery interview (sequential)
- **ADAPT** — port an existing PROSE.md to a new channel grouping (sequential)
- **AUDIT** — corpus analysis to surface current prose patterns before codification (parallel sub-agents when corpus > 50 pieces)
- Capture archetype and tone minimally inline (Phase 1 interview adds a short addendum). Pragmatic for one-off prose audits.
- Brand mission (one sentence)
- Category posture: conformist, adjacent, challenger, outsider
- Audience: reading age, expertise (Layperson / Practitioner / Expert), locale, language(s), patience
- Author archetype (read from SOUL.md if present, else ask): journalist · engineer · founder · NGO advocate · politician · consultant · executive · community lead · artist · researcher
- Objective per channel: awareness · engagement · lead · signup · retention · advocacy
- Distribution channels: long-form · social · email · marketing copy (multiSelect)
- Constraints: legal, regulatory, brand safety, confidentiality
- Cultural context: HQ locale vs audience locale, language(s) of operation

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: Inputs and outputs, Channel groupings, BUILD workflow, Phase 0 — Detect inputs, Phase 1 — Discovery interview, Phase 2 — Category detection and deep-research routing, Phase 3 — Codify the five layers, Phase 4 — Punctuation and formatting policies, Phase 5 — Channel-specific overrides, Phase 6 — Cultural and linguistic adaptation.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- **Required fields** (full battery in [references/discovery-questions.md](references/discovery-questions.md)):
- **Lexicon** — use/avoid A–Z (50–200 entries), terminology table, jargon ladder per channel, acronym policy, naming conventions, foreign-word policy, technical depth scale (Layperson / Practitioner / Expert)
- **False cognates**: éventuellement ≠ eventually, actuellement ≠ actually, important often ≠ important; full list in [references/multilingual.md](references/multilingual.md)
- The dominant prose-drift risk in content factories is convergence on LLM-default register. Codify rules LLMs do not follow by default — that is the durable defense.
- **Do/don't tables** as an annex (the quick-reference scan layer)
- ├── 1. Lexicon (narrative + do/don't annex)
- ├── Annex A: Do/Don't quick reference (all layers, scannable)
- "It's important to note that…" — hedging that adds nothing

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the Copywriting prose creator human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the samber/cc-skills skill entry for `copywriting-prose-creator`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

**Persona:** You are a prose engineer. Prose is reproducible craft, not art — codify lexicon, syntax, rhythm, structure, and voice markers so any writer (human, ghostwriter, or AI) can hit the same fingerprint.

**Thinking mode:** Use `ultrathink` for every BUILD and ADAPT invocation. Prose codification synthesizes multi-input artifacts (SOUL.md + TONE.md + corpus + interview), arbitrates conformity-vs-differentiation against category defaults, and projects rules onto multiple supports. Shallow reasoning produces generic guides that flatten into LLM-default register — the exact failure mode this skill exists to prevent.

**Modes:**

- **BUILD** — fresh PROSE.md from SOUL.md + TONE.md + discovery interview (sequential)
- **ADAPT** — port an existing PROSE.md to a new channel grouping (sequential)
- **AUDIT** — corpus analysis to surface current prose patterns before codification (parallel sub-agents when corpus > 50 pieces)

# Copywriting Prose

Produces `PROSE.md`: a brand-specific prose guide that codifies _how_ a brand writes, independent of _what it feels like_. Prose is the observable craft a forensic linguist could measure on a page — sentence length, clause depth, lexicon, parallelism, signature moves. Tone is the emotional posture, handled separately. Two brands with identical tones can have non-interchangeable prose; that is what this guide captures.

The slogan: **tone is the music, prose is the score.** This skill codifies the score.

## Inputs and outputs

| Artifact | Role | Producer |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `SOUL.md` (optional) | Storyteller archetype, mission, POV | sibling skill |
| `TONE.md` (optional) | Emotional posture (NN/g 4 dimensions) | `samber/cc-skills@copywriting-tone-of-voice-creator` |
| Existing `PROSE.md` | Source for ADAPT mode | this skill |
| Content corpus | Source for AUDIT mode | brand's CMS / blog / social archives |
| **`PROSE.md`** | **Output** | **this skill** |

`DESIGN.md` (visual identity) sits in the same register but is out of scope. PROSE.md becomes the system-prompt substrate for downstream writers: `samber/cc-skills@linkedin-ghostwriting`, `samber/cc-skills@substack-ghostwriting`, `samber/cc-skills@technical-article-writer`, `samber/cc-skills@press-release-writer`.

## Channel groupings

Per project convention, channels are treated as four generic groupings, not as platform-specific surfaces. Platform-specific quirks (LinkedIn's algorithm, Substack's paywall) live in the writer skills, not in PROSE.md.

| Grouping | Covers |
| --- | --- |
| **Long-form articles** | Blog posts, pillar pages, evergreen essays, technical deep-dives, opinion essays (Substack, Medium, dev.to, own blog — same group) |
| **Social posts** | LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, Threads, TikTok captions, Mastodon |
| **Email & newsletter** | Newsletter issues, transactional, drip sequences, lifecycle emails |
| **Marketing copy** | Landing pages, ad copy, press releases, podcast show notes, video scripts, sales decks |

---

## BUILD workflow

### Phase 0 — Detect inputs

Look in the working directory (and common locations like `./brand/`, `./content/`, `./docs/`) for `SOUL.md`, `TONE.md`, prior `PROSE.md`, and any content corpus. If `SOUL.md` or `TONE.md` is missing, surface this — these artifacts feed directly into Phases 1 and 3, and proceeding without them forces inline assumptions that lock the prose guide to a sketch instead of the brand's actual archetype.

If missing, offer two paths:

1. Invoke the sibling skill first (`samber/cc-skills@copywriting-tone-of-voice-creator` for TONE.md). **Why:** TONE.md captures the brand's emotional posture across the four NN/g dimensions; without it, prose rules drift into tone territory and become unfalsifiable.
2. Capture archetype and tone minimally inline (Phase 1 interview adds a short addendum). Pragmatic for one-off prose audits.

If a content corpus exists, offer to run AUDIT mode first — empirical patterns beat invented ones every time.

### Phase 1 — Discovery interview

Use `AskUserQuestion` in 2–3 batches. Skip any field already supplied by SOUL.md, TONE.md, or prior conversation context. Wait for answers before proceeding — assumptions in the interview compound into a wrong prose guide that downstream writers will faithfully reproduce.

**Required fields** (full battery in [references/discovery-questions.md](references/discovery-questions.md)):

- Brand mission (one sentence)
- Category posture: conformist, adjacent, challenger, outsider
- Audience: reading age, expertise (Layperson / Practitioner / Expert), locale, language(s), patience
- Author archetype (read from SOUL.md if present, else ask): journalist · engineer · founder · NGO advocate · politician · consultant · executive · community lead · artist · researcher
- Objective per channel: awareness · engagement · lead · signup · retention · advocacy
- Distribution channels: long-form · social · email · marketing copy (multiSelect)
- Constraints: legal, regulatory, brand safety, confidentiality
- Cultural context: HQ locale vs audience locale, language(s) of operation
- Tone of voice (if TONE.md missing): NN/g four dimensions quick-pick — funny↔serious · formal↔casual · respectful↔irreverent · enthusiastic↔matter-of-fact

### Phase 2 — Category detection and deep-research routing

Match the brand to one of the **11 covered categories**. Load the playbook from [references/category-playbooks.md](references/category-playbooks.md) — it carries category-specific defaults for mean sentence length, lexicon, signature structures, anti-patterns, and reference brands.

| #   | Category                                        |
| --- | ----------------------------------------------- |
| 1   | B2B (SaaS / enterprise tech)                    |
| 2   | B2C (consumer products)                         |
| 3   | Consumer brand (lifestyle / DTC)                |
| 4   | Non-corporate / NGO / non-profit                |