Copywriting Prose Creator

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 |

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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 | | 5 | Consulting / professional services | | 6 | Product-led (makers, indie hackers, dev tools) | | 7 | Industry (manufacturing, deep-tech, industrial) | | 8 | Volunteering / community / association | | 9 | Personal branding (per-principal) | | 10 | Politics / advocacy / public figures | | 11 | Internal corporate communication |

Uncovered context → delegate research. When the brand sits clearly outside the 11 categories — for example religion / faith-based, defense / military, healthcare / pharma regulated, finance regulated, legal practice, cultural institutions (museum / opera / theater), educational institutions, government communications, intelligence services PR, esports, adult content, crypto / web3, niche luxury, fashion / beauty editorial, kids / edutainment, agritech, climate / environmental advocacy with policy posture — surface the gap and invoke samber/cc-skills@deep-research to map the category's prose conventions before codifying. Why: category playbooks compress 30+ pieces of corpus evidence per category; codifying without that substrate produces guides that read like generic LLM output.

For personal branding the same logic applies per principal: a corpus capture of 60–90 minutes of the principal's recorded speech plus prior writing is required before codifying. Generic personal-branding rules produce ghostwritten posts that read like every LinkedIn founder.

Phase 3 — Codify the five layers

Codify each layer in order. Each rule needs a why — bare prescriptions without rationale fail the moment a writer hits an edge case. Detail rules and examples in [references/five-layers.md](references/five-layers.md).

1. 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)
2. Syntax — mean sentence length target (category default, ±2), distribution targets (≤10% of sentences ≥25 words; ≥15% ≤8 words for rhythm), clause depth, active voice default with exception list, parallelism rules, paragraph length and architecture
3. Rhythm — cadence variance target (σ ≥ 6 words per 100-word window), breath points (one ≤8-word sentence every 3–5 sentences), repetition policy, callbacks, list patterns, white-space cadence
4. Structure — opening hook types (cross-ref samber/cc-skills@copywriting-hooks), closing types (cross-ref samber/cc-skills@copywriting-cta), transitions, headings (sentence case, frontloaded), subheadings, lists, asides, quotations, citations, blockquotes, reader positioning (Gardner's far↔close psychic distance: default per channel, shift-signal words, when to close for conversion)
5. Voice markers — 5–12 signature moves, signoffs, recurring metaphors, idioms, taboos, intentional tics (all rationed; unrationed markers collapse into self-parody)

Diagnose the corpus before locking the targets:

1. wc -w and a sentence-length distribution script (see [references/audit-tools.md](references/audit-tools.md)) — establish current mean and σ before declaring targets
2. Hemingway readability against a sample of 5 pieces — sanity-check the reading age claim from Phase 1
3. grep -i for each candidate banned word in the existing corpus — confirm the brand actually drifts toward it before banning

Phase 4 — Punctuation and formatting policies

Two non-negotiable tables.

Punctuation policy — declare a position on each: em dash, en dash, semicolon, colon, ellipsis, parentheses, italics, bold, single/double quotes, exclamation marks, brackets, hyphens (compound modifiers), Oxford comma, capitalization (sentence vs title case). Defaults and rationing tables live in [references/five-layers.md](references/five-layers.md#punctuation).

Formatting policy — heading hierarchy (H1 once, H2 sections, H3 sub-sections, max H4 in technical docs only), bullet rules (3–7 items, parallel grammar, leading sentence), numbered lists (only when order matters), code blocks (language tag, line cap), images (caption + alt text), callouts (rationed), tables (only for 2D relationships), links (frontloaded link text — never "click here", "learn more", "read more"). Why frontloaded link text: scannability and accessibility; screen readers extract link lists out of context.

Phase 5 — Channel-specific overrides

For each in-scope channel grouping (see table above), produce a CHANNEL section in PROSE.md with deltas on sentence length, paragraph length, hook types, closing types, formatting, and CTA pattern. Pull the transformation rules from [references/channel-adaptation.md](references/channel-adaptation.md).

Generic groupings keep PROSE.md portable: when a brand adds a new platform within a grouping (e.g. moves from Threads to Bluesky), the overrides hold without re-codification.

Phase 6 — Cultural and linguistic adaptation

• English variant: declare US / UK / international English (spelling, punctuation, date format)
• French ↔ English: list the few French words permitted in English text (raison d'être, savoir-faire) and forbid others without translation; conversely declare English loan-words accepted in French (le marketing, le briefing) vs taboo
• False cognates: éventuellement ≠ eventually, actuellement ≠ actually, important often ≠ important; full list in [references/multilingual.md](references/multilingual.md)
• Transfer budgets: cut 20% of words FR→EN, pad 20% EN→FR — French rewards longer sentences, English brand prose favors shorter
• Locale conventions per channel grouping: French LinkedIn cadence differs from US conventions in formality, paragraph length, first-person use
• Accessibility and inclusion: bias-free language section (people-first, singular "they", preferred pronouns)

For multilingual brands: one PROSE.md per language, not a translated single guide. Maintain a mapping document of shared pillars and divergent rules.

Phase 7 — Anti-LLM countermeasures

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.

Full inventory in [references/anti-patterns.md](references/anti-patterns.md). Headline patterns:

• Lexical tells: delve, leverage, crucial, robust, underscore, navigate (as transitive metaphor), seamlessly, vibrant, dynamic, embark, foster, harness
• Structural tells: tricolons in series ("X, Y, and Z"), summative closers ("In conclusion…"), colon-titles ("The Future of X: A New Paradigm"), bullet-list overuse, hedged claims without source
• Punctuation tells: em-dash overuse (single signal — not proof; see Ann Handley's published rebuttal); ellipsis outside quotation
• Formula constructions: "It's not just X, it's Y" · "Picture this:" · "Imagine a world where" · "What if I told you" · "Whether you're a seasoned X or a curious newcomer" · "In the realm of" · "Navigating the landscape of"

Diagnose LLM drift quantitatively:

1. grep -c -iE 'delve|leverage|crucial|robust|underscore' across the corpus — frequency ≥1 per 500 words is a strong tell
2. Sentence-length σ section appended to PROSE.md, or a standalone PROSE-.md` if the user prefers a separate artifact. Why offer both: content teams that publish across many channels prefer one master file; ghostwriting agencies handling a single channel prefer per-channel files.
3. Cross-reference back to the original PROSE.md for fields unchanged.

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AUDIT workflow

Extract current prose patterns from a corpus before codifying. Empirical patterns beat invented ones.

1. Take the corpus (folder of .md / .txt or list of URLs).
2. For corpora > 50 pieces, parallelize: spin up to 5 sub-agents via the Agent tool, splitting the corpus by date range, channel, or author. Each agent reports back with the same metrics. Why parallel: sequential reading on a 200-piece corpus is slow and runs out of context; parallel sub-agents read independently and synthesize.
3. Compute (per [references/audit-tools.md](references/audit-tools.md)):

• Mean sentence length and distribution
• Top 50 lexemes, top bigrams and trigrams
• Banned-word and AI-tell frequency
• Em-dash count per 1,000 words
• Opening pattern map (first 50 words of 30 pieces, side by side)
• Closing pattern map

1. Run an adversarial reading pass on 3–5 representative pieces — challenge the assumption that they work. Mark every sentence that doesn't earn its place, every unanswered reader question, every moment authority collapses, every paragraph where a reader would disengage. See [references/audit-tools.md](references/audit-tools.md#adversarial-reading) for the methodology.
2. Sort findings into four buckets: signature (recurring, distinctive, working) · default (recurring, generic, neutral) · noise (inconsistent, accidental, weak) · liability (recurring, actively harming credibility or engagement — the adversarial pass surfaces these).
3. Produce AUDIT-MEMO.md (5–10 pages: quantitative tables + qualitative annotated samples + "keep, kill, differentiate" summary). Feed into BUILD Phase 3.

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Output format

PROSE.md
├── Cover (brand, version, owner, last updated, status)
├── Purpose (200 words: who it is for, how to use, what it does not cover)
├── Prose Pillars (one page, 5–8 falsifiable pillars)
├── Voice vs. Tone note (one paragraph)
├── 1. Lexicon (narrative + do/don't annex)
├── 2. Syntax
├── 3. Rhythm
├── 4. Structure
├── 5. Voice Markers
├── 6. Punctuation Policy
├── 7. Formatting Policy
├── 8. Channel Overrides (one section per in-scope grouping)
├── 9. Cultural & Linguistic Adaptation
├── 10. Anti-LLM Countermeasures
├── 11. Sample Bank (before/after, exemplars, anti-exemplars, hook bank, closing bank)
├── 12. Ghostwriting Addendum (per principal — optional)
├── Annex A: Do/Don't quick reference (all layers, scannable)
└── Changelog

A complete PROSE.md i

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Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: samber
• Source: samber/cc-skills
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://skills.sh/samber/cc-skills

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.