agora: Skill for Claude Code

headline-craft: the one line that decides whether anyone reads the rest

A headline is a claim. It gets the same rigor as a number: a source for the craft, a test it must pass, several versions, and the owner's choice. Never adopt a headline a red-team lens wrote; a lens fixes overclaim, it does not write headlines.

The three tests (Harry Dry, applied to every candidate)

1. Can I visualize it? Concrete beats abstract. "Charging pitbull" is remembered, "better way" is not. Zoom in until the sentence names an object: not "regain fitness" but "couch to 5K".
2. Can I falsify it? A sentence that is true or false makes the reader sit up. "He reads on the tube" beats "he is intelligent". Point at the fact; do not talk about it.
3. Can nobody else say it? "Never write an ad a competitor can sign." If any memory vendor or any other blog could put its name under the line, it is not ours yet.

Three no's means rubbish. Three yes's means a candidate. Then the two-second test: show it to someone cold, count "one Mississippi, two Mississippi"; if they do not get it by two, rewrite.

The method

• Start from a fact, ours, measured this cycle. The Rolls-Royce clock line was pulled from a motor magazine; Ogilvy's craft was choosing it. Our facts are the probe outputs.
• Conflict. Draw a line down the page and write the two sides: what the API said versus what the disk held; before versus after; the corporate way versus the copywriting way. The reader remembers relatively.
• Write twenty versions. The first dozen are the dirty water out of the tap. Keep going until a line you cannot add a word to or take a word from. Show three versions to a reader, never one; "I like it" is not feedback, "that sentence, in that one" is.
• Parallelism and rhythm. "22,000 hours writing, two learning how" was rewritten from 20,000 for the parallel. Tougher than an F-150, faster than a 911.
• Small claim, believable. "Increase conversions from 1% to 2%" sells because it is sincere; "be a millionaire" does not. Our body says "evidence, not proof", so the headline may not say "prove".
• Write it where the reader sees it: the title in the search result mockup, the Reddit title in a list of other titles, the H1 on the rendered page. A line that spills to two lines is rewritten.