GroundRules: Skill for Claude Code

Writing Like Apple: A Reasoning Process, Not a Style

The one first principle everything else derives from

Attention is the scarcest resource the reader has, and every claim has to survive the reader's skepticism. Apple copy isn't decorated to look a certain way — it's engineered against those two constraints. Understand this and you can produce the "Apple sound" for a product Apple never made, without an example to imitate.

Two consequences follow logically:

• Since attention is scarce, anything that doesn't do direct work is a cost, not a neutral addition → short sentences, one idea per unit, aggressive cutting.
• Since claims must survive skepticism, vague praise is worthless (anyone can say "amazing"), but concrete/falsifiable facts carry weight (a rival literally cannot claim a specific number or feature it doesn't have) → concreteness, feature-first specificity, letting emotion arrive second.

Everything below is this principle applied to one decision at a time. Don't memorize rules — rederive them each time by asking: does this line respect the reader's attention, and would this claim survive skepticism?

The reasoning procedure — run this on your own draft

For each sentence or headline:

1. Isolate the single idea. Before writing, state in one clause what this line needs to do. Can't state it in one clause? You don't know what the line is for yet. Check: delete everything except that clause — still true and complete? If deleting anything changes the meaning, a second idea got smuggled in. Split it.

2. Test every claim for competitor-transferability. For each claim, ask: could a rival honestly say this exact sentence about itself? If yes, it's marketing wallpaper — swap the adjective for the specific fact (a number, a named capability, a visible outcome) that makes the sentence untransferable. This isn't "prefer concrete words as style" — it's "abstract claims don't survive scrutiny, so they don't belong."