Reader Briefing

A pre-writing discipline for public articles. The briefing is a short structured document, written before drafting begins, that establishes who the article is for and what they bring to the page. It is the audit anchor that the rest of the writing process compares against.

This skill is foundation infrastructure. Other writing skills (synthesis-article-writing, synthesis-article-refresh, the various backdated- and refresh-style skills) treat a committed briefing as a hard precondition: without one, they refuse to proceed.

Why this skill exists

AI-assisted writing has a specific failure mode: when source material (lessons, project context, commit messages, codebases) is loaded into the writing process, the draft inherits the source's framing. The source was written by the writer for the writer. It assumes its reader already has the context. An article written for a stranger has to assume the opposite. Translating between those frames is the actual writing work, and it is the work AI is most likely to skip when given source material to follow.

The result is insider context collapse — right vocabulary deployed for an audience that does not share the writer's context. The grammar is clean, the saturated AI vocabulary is absent, the mechanical quality checks pass, and the article is unreadable to the people it is for.

The fix is procedural: a structured briefing before drafting, then an audit pass against the briefing during review. The check has to be procedural because the writer is the insider — the jargon reads as natural prose to the person who wrote it. Reading the draft and trusting your judgment will not catch this.

This skill is also the procedural workaround for the well-known curse-of-knowledge bias in writing: experts cannot easily imagine what it is like to not know what they know. The briefing forces the imagination.