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From cc-skills
Codifies brand prose mechanics (lexicon, syntax, rhythm, signature moves) into a PROSE.md style guide for editorial teams and ghostwriters. Supports BUILD, ADAPT, and AUDIT modes.
npx claudepluginhub samber/cc --plugin cc-skillsHow this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/cc-skills:copywriting-prose-creatorThis skill is limited to the following tools:
The summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
**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.
Builds reusable writing style profiles from source materials like posts, essays, launch notes, docs, or site copy for consistent voice in content, outreach, and social workflows.
Captures and refines user's writing voice into AUTHOR_VOICE.md via discovery questions, drafts, sample generation, and feedback cycles for AI mimicking tone/style.
Creates or adapts a machine-readable TONE.md brand voice guide via discovery, voice definition, and channel modulation. For building brand voice infrastructure consumed by downstream content skills.
Share bugs, ideas, or general feedback.
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:
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.
| 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.
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 |
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:
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.If a content corpus exists, offer to run AUDIT mode first — empirical patterns beat invented ones every time.
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):
Match the brand to one of the 11 covered categories. Load the playbook from 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.
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.
samber/cc-skills@copywriting-hooks), closing types (cross-ref samber/cc-skills@copywriting-cta), transitions, headings (sentence case, frontloaded), subheadings, lists, asides, quotations, citations, blockquotesDiagnose the corpus before locking the targets:
wc -w and a sentence-length distribution script (see references/audit-tools.md) — establish current mean and σ before declaring targetsgrep -i for each candidate banned word in the existing corpus — confirm the brand actually drifts toward it before banningTwo 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.
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.
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.
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.
For multilingual brands: one PROSE.md per language, not a translated single guide. Maintain a mapping document of shared pillars and divergent rules.
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. Headline patterns:
Diagnose LLM drift quantitatively:
grep -c -iE 'delve|leverage|crucial|robust|underscore' across the corpus — frequency ≥1 per 500 words is a strong tellDetection is unreliable as a single source of truth. Use these as triage, not verdict. The Stanford HAI / Liang et al. (2023) work showed GPT detectors misclassify TOEFL essays by non-native English writers at headline rates above 60%. Treat any single signal as suspicion, not proof.
Use the hybrid template in references/prose-md-template.md:
samber/cc-skills@copywriting-hooks / @copywriting-ctaTake an existing PROSE.md and project it onto a new channel grouping.
CHANNEL OVERRIDE — <grouping> section appended to PROSE.md, or a standalone PROSE-<grouping>.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.Extract current prose patterns from a corpus before codifying. Empirical patterns beat invented ones.
.md / .txt or list of URLs).AUDIT-MEMO.md (5–10 pages: quantitative tables + qualitative annotated samples + "keep, kill, differentiate" summary). Feed into BUILD Phase 3.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 is 20–60 pages depending on category coverage and channel scope. Resist the urge to maximize length — Siemens reduced their brand guidelines from 2,750 to 250 pages because enforceable density beats exhaustiveness. Aim for the density that an editor can apply line by line; cut anything an editor cannot turn into a concrete edit.
| File | When to read |
|---|---|
| discovery-questions.md | During Phase 1 interview |
| five-layers.md | During Phase 3 codification |
| category-playbooks.md | During Phase 2 after category detection |
| channel-adaptation.md | During Phase 5 and all ADAPT invocations |
| anti-patterns.md | During Phase 7 and AUDIT mode |
| multilingual.md | During Phase 6 when brand operates in EN/FR |
| prose-md-template.md | During Phase 8 render |
| brand-atlas.md | During Phase 2 archetype matching |
| audit-tools.md | During AUDIT mode and Phase 3 corpus diagnosis |
This skill is not exhaustive. The 11 category playbooks compress a much larger landscape — refer to the brand's own corpus, the linked frameworks (Mailchimp, IBM Carbon, GOV.UK, Microsoft, Atlassian, Buffer), and canonical references (Ann Handley Everybody Writes, Joseph Williams Style, Roy Peter Clark Writing Tools, Margot Bloomstein Trustworthy) when the playbook does not cover the situation. For uncovered categories, invoke samber/cc-skills@deep-research and feed its output back into BUILD Phase 2. Prose guides decay; a PROSE.md not re-audited every 12 months is a snapshot, not a living document.
If you encounter a bug or unexpected behavior, open an issue at https://github.com/samber/cc-skills/issues.