No briefing, no draft. Write the four-paragraph reader briefing as .briefing.md beside the draft before any research or drafting (Phase 0).
Article-level work loads the whole stack in the load-with contract below; a prose-only review clears bodies while their titles fail.
Cite everything and draft only from verified research. Rate each item's confidence, use only Verified and Likely accurate items, and ask rather than invent.
Name removal is not anonymization. Every real example must pass the outsider, insider, adversary and irony tests; one failure rules it out.
Never attribute unverified quotes to real people, invent technical achievements, or create scenarios inconsistent with the author's public record. These are fabrication bans, not identifiability tests.
Write alt text when you place an image, after viewing it; never infer its content from the filename, since a file named for a person may be a letter they wrote.
No inline author bio on a site whose layout renders one; it would duplicate the layout's single source of truth.
Run all eleven Phase 3 lenses before publishing. After any de-jargoning pass, re-verify every replaced term against its source.
One confirmed defect is a search obligation: look for the same defect across the article and the batch before closing it.
Title-only stranger test for every article: record subject, stake, specificity and jargon debt before reading the description or body. A description cannot repair a failed title; without a per-article title table, no readiness sign-off.
Title, description, lede, headings and body must make the same claim. A broadened title or heading fails even when every sentence is accurate.
State each article's reader value in one sentence. "No slop markers" is negative evidence and does not establish value.
A new final title on an unpublished article reopens its slug and metadata until every surface closes together; a clean build does not prove the routes are right.
Measure replacement titles on the same axes as the diagnosis, so a cure cannot push a different formula over budget.

references/research-and-drafting.md: Phase 1 (research principles, confidence levels, deliverables, output format) and Phase 2 (writing principles, content architecture, voice, hyperlinks, alt text, ethical storytelling and anonymization, output deliverables, author bios, success criteria). Read it before researching or drafting.
references/draft-review.md: Phase 3, the eleven critical-review lenses. Read it when reviewing a finished draft.
references/package-review.md: Phase 4, sections 4.1 to 4.6 (title-only test, newcomer lens, truth contract, batch budget, reader-value row, slug closure). Read it for headline, metadata, batch or publication-readiness review.
references/publication-review-fixtures.md: seventeen worked fixtures and the disposition a correct review must reach. Read it when testing a review process or changing these gates.
references/coverage-map.md: where each part of the 2.3.0 text now lives.
Load-with contract, Phase 0: below.

Load-with contract

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.

Part of the synthesis writing craft — the writer writes, the AI assists.

Contents

Load-with contract

Phase 0: Reader Briefing (REQUIRED PRECONDITION)

Related

synthesis-article-writing

Article Writing

Binding rules