Copywriting
This skill is the shared craft model the planning and writing skills draw on — the vocabulary they speak, never a Process to run and never a step in a pipeline. plan-copy settles these concepts, the write-* skills execute them, and the check-* skills judge the draft. Every reference below is a home other skills reach into.
The law: problem-driven, never feature-driven
Good copy is problem-driven; feature-driven copy is the failure mode. Everything is built from the reader's problem: what the problem is, how people refer to it, its symptoms, where it hurts exactly, how other people react to it, the fears surrounding it, the dreams surrounding it. Those problem dimensions are what research mines and what strategy builds from. Features enter copy exclusively as a features section — a summary of the facts for ultra-aware readers; the form for using a feature as the argument behind a specific benefit is an owner-open question, never invented. Copy is written to one person, in the plain, casual words the market already uses.
The master variable is awareness and sophistication: where the reader stands and how many times the market has heard the claim. It decides the lead, the headline, the proof, and the length of everything downstream. Settle it first, then everything else follows.
The model
- Read the reader from Reader.md. Awareness, Sophistication, and Audience are set in the deliverable's Reader.md by the strategist; take them from those fields and never re-derive them from the research corpus. Each field decides moves the writers already know: Awareness picks the lead, the headline, and the hook formula; Sophistication decides whether the named mechanism has to lead and how hard the proof works; Audience is the named buyer whose language and buying questions the piece uses, never a generic reader. The one home for the awareness model in the profile → references/awareness-and-sophistication.md.
- Settle the offer and position. The one promise, the position against the named alternative, and the offer shape copy cannot rescue if they are weak → references/offer-and-positioning.md.
- Find the angle and the lead type. The angle sources, and which lead type the awareness stage calls for (the write-leads skill executes the chosen type) → references/big-idea-and-lead.md.
- Choose the structure that carries the idea. The persuasion structures (PAS, BAB, AIDA, 4Ps, PASTOR, Star-Story-Solution, Feature-Benefit Bridge) and which awareness stage each fits. The idea picks the structure, never the reverse → references/persuasion-structures.md.
- Back the claim with proof. Pair each claim with the proof that makes it believable, and reach for the cognitive lever that fits → references/proof-and-credibility.md and references/psychology.md.
- Open a loop with every benefit bullet. The fascination — the highest-leverage line a scanner reads — turns a benefit into a curiosity-driven line that opens a loop the reader needs closed → references/bullets-and-fascinations.md.
- In-product microcopy. Signup, paywall, popup, empty state, cancellation → references/microcopy.md.
Where the writing happens
The asset writers own the writing itself: write-headlines, write-hooks, write-leads for the opening unit; write-sales-page, write-optin-page, write-catalog-page for pages; write-story for narrative; write-ads, write-emails, write-social-posts for channels; write-vsl, write-video-script for scripts. The draft is judged by the check-* skills.