Article Writing

A five-phase workflow for creating high-quality thought leadership articles: reader briefing, research/validation, strategic writing, pre-publication critical review, and publication-package review. Use when exploring a book, concept, or trend and connecting it to your expertise.

Load-with contract for publication review. Article drafting, headline work, article-package review, and publication-readiness review load the full prose-quality stack (synthesis-content-quality, synthesis-writing-pitfalls, synthesis-writing-craft, plus the author's private voice skill where one exists) and the framing plane: synthesis-reader-briefing, synthesis-content-framing, and this skill. A prose-stack-only route reviews bodies while the title/lede/reader-entry plane goes unexamined — the documented Set A failure mode: a full-body review cleared 29 of 30 packages whose titles then failed a title-only skim (6 keep / 8 tune / 16 replace). Do not load the framing plane for every email or sentence edit; the trigger is article-level framing or publication readiness.

Phase 0: Reader Briefing (REQUIRED PRECONDITION)

Hard precondition. Before any research or drafting begins, write a four-paragraph reader briefing using the synthesis-reader-briefing skill. The briefing answers four questions: who is this for, what do they bring to the page, what does the article ask of them, what does the reader leave with.

The briefing lives as .briefing.md adjacent to the draft (in the same directory as the article markdown file). Without a committed briefing, this skill refuses to proceed. The friction is intentional — drafting without a briefing is the documented failure mode of inheriting source-material framing in articles meant for an external audience.

The briefing is the audit anchor that Phase 2 (writing) and Phase 3 (review) compare against. The article's structural decisions (universal-frame-first vs scene-first vs claim-first vs problem-first) follow from the briefing's answers, not from a template.

See synthesis-reader-briefing for the four questions, worked examples across genres (technical, personal-narrative, opinion, advisory), and the audit discipline.