Building the Style Specification

Overview

Translate all prior analysis outputs into a single, implementable style specification by mapping each finding to a concrete writing constraint, resolving conflicts between analyses, and producing both a numeric profile and a prose description usable as an LLM system prompt or human writing guide. The core principle: every constraint in the specification must trace to a specific analysis finding with a stated confidence level, and no analysis finding should appear in the specification without being translated into an actionable constraint. Raw analysis outputs are observations; the style specification is a set of instructions. This skill performs the translation.

Why this is the penultimate step: All upstream analyses (personality profiling, stylometric fingerprinting, psycholinguistic categorization, readability metrics, rhetorical structure, accommodation patterns, archetype classification, register variation, speech act distribution, audience patterns, and persona framing) produce findings in their own frameworks. Without a specification-building step, those findings remain siloed observations. The style specification resolves them into a single coherent document that the final step (voice prompt engineering or human style guide creation) can consume directly.

Design influences: Nielsen Norman Group's four dimensions of tone (formal/casual, serious/funny, respectful/irreverent, enthusiastic/matter-of-fact); the COSTAR prompt framework (Context, Objective, Style, Tone, Audience, Response); Mailchimp and Google voice-and-tone documentation patterns; meta-analytic evidence that LLMs follow 5-12 well-prioritized constraints more reliably than 30+ undifferentiated rules.

When to Use

• Multiple linguistic analyses have been completed and need consolidation into one voice profile
• Building an LLM system prompt that replicates a specific writing voice
• Creating a human-readable style guide from quantitative analysis outputs
• Need to resolve contradictions between different analyses (e.g., personality suggests formality but stylometrics show casual function-word patterns)
• Preparing the penultimate deliverable before final prompt engineering or style guide assembly
• Converting a set of analysis reports into actionable writing constraints