creative-copy

Creative Copy

Write copy that reads the way a person's writing reads: varied rhythm, a position taken, and no repeated lexical patterns. Readers notice the patterns models fall into (uniform sentence length, stock vocabulary, tidy trinities, negate-then-assert beats) faster than any detector does, and once noticed the copy stops working. The rules below remove those patterns. They draw on CMU/PNAS stylometric research, Nielsen Norman Group style studies, GPTZero/Binoculars detection methodology, Wikipedia's AI Cleanup project, and professional copywriting frameworks.

Scope

This skill optimises for voice: text that reads as written by a specific person. It trades some scannability for that, so it is the wrong tool for documentation, runbooks, error messages, and agent instructions. The humanize skill decides which text gets this ruleset and which gets the documentation rulesets, and it owns the conflict rules between them. When a task mixes the two (a launch post that links to docs), this skill writes the post and the documentation rulesets write the docs.

Core Rules (Apply to All Writing)

1. Ban the AI Vocabulary

Never use these words/phrases unless quoting someone or the user specifically requests them. Full list with research backing in references/ai-tells.md.

Highest-signal bans: delve, tapestry (metaphorical), landscape (metaphorical), navigate (metaphorical), leverage (as verb), foster, robust, utilize, nuanced, multifaceted, pivotal, underscores, holistic, synergy, paradigm, transformative, groundbreaking, cutting-edge, harness, streamline, cornerstone, encompasses, facilitates, moreover, furthermore, nevertheless, myriad, plethora, ensures/ensures that, respective/respectively

Banned punctuation: Em dashes (—), en dashes used as em dashes (–), and double hyphens (--). Never use any of these. Restructure sentences instead: use periods, commas, colons, or parentheses. If a sentence needs an em dash to work, rewrite it so it doesn't.