Technical Copywriting

Technical Copywriting

v1.0.0 | Long-form technical content | 5 skills

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The Problem

Technical writing for an audience — blog posts, tutorials, deep-dives, newsletters, whitepapers, technical essays — is a different discipline from the technical writing most engineers have practiced. Code docs explain something the reader has already chosen to use. Long-form technical content has to earn the reader's attention, hold it across thousands of words, and leave them with an idea they can use.

Most technical articles fail in predictable ways:

• Buried thesis. The interesting claim is in paragraph nine. The reader leaves at paragraph two.
• Asserted authority. The piece claims expertise instead of demonstrating it.
• Generic prose. Every sentence could have been written by anyone about anything.
• Unsourced claims. "Studies show…" with no study cited; benchmarks with no methodology.
• Listicle disease. Five disconnected tips presented as a structured argument.
• No hook. The article opens with "In today's fast-paced digital landscape…" and the reader is gone.
• Weak titles. A piece worth reading dies because the title gives the reader no reason to click.

These failures are well-studied. Copywriters have spent a century cataloging what works: hooks, promise-payoff contracts, AIDA, PAS, Bencivenga's pyramid, Sugarman's slippery slide, Schwartz's awareness levels, the inverted pyramid, the read-aloud test, the 30% cut. The techniques are proven; most technical writers have never been taught them.

The Solution

The technical-copywriting plugin gives Claude five composable skills, each scoped to one phase of the long-form workflow:

1. technical-research — Research before craft. Profile the audience, tier the sources, triangulate facts across three sources before citing, manage evidence types (data, expert quotes, demonstrations, case studies), and apply citation discipline so claims survive scrutiny.

2. long-form-structure — Structure the piece around the hook → promise → payoff contract. Pick the right template (deep-dive, tutorial, opinion, case study, whitepaper, technical narrative). Engineer transitions that pull the reader from section to section. Match length to ambition.

3. engaging-craft — Apply proven copywriting formulas (AIDA, PAS, BAB, Bencivenga's pyramid, Sugarman's slippery slide) to technical content. Engineer hooks. Tune voice and tonality. Replace abstract claims with concrete examples. Build callbacks that reward the careful reader.

4. long-form-polish — The polish phase that's distinct from line-level clarity editing. Manage pacing and rhythm. Engineer scan-ability for the skim reader without abandoning the deep reader. Apply the 30% cut. Read aloud to find every bump.

5. distribution-craft — The article doesn't end at the last paragraph. Engineer titles that survive a noisy feed. Write deks and meta descriptions that get the click. Pull social quotes that travel. Reframe for each channel (X/LinkedIn/HN/Reddit/newsletter) without writing five articles.

Why these five

Each skill maps to a phase of the workflow that has its own techniques, anti-patterns, and craft tradition:

Phase	Skill	What it produces
Pre-writing	technical-research	A research brief: audience, sources, evidence inventory, claim-evidence map
Architecture	long-form-structure	An outline with hook, promise, sections, payoff
Drafting	engaging-craft	A draft that holds attention from sentence to sentence
Revision	long-form-polish	A polished piece that scans cleanly and reads aloud well
Launch	distribution-craft	A title, dek, social pulls, and channel-specific frames

Installation

/plugin marketplace add viktorbezdek/skillstack
/plugin install technical-copywriting@skillstack

Usage

Each skill auto-activates on relevant queries. Common patterns:

• "Research and outline a deep-dive on incremental adoption of strict mode" → activates technical-research then long-form-structure
• "Make this article more engaging" → activates engaging-craft
• "Polish this draft for pacing and scan-ability" → activates long-form-polish
• "Suggest titles and a dek for this piece" → activates distribution-craft

You can also chain them explicitly: research → structure → craft → polish → distribute.

What this plugin is NOT

• NOT for code documentation, READMEs, or API references — use documentation-generator.
• NOT for UX microcopy (button labels, error messages) — use ux-writing.
• NOT for short-form work writing (RFCs, ADRs, design docs, emails) — use communication (especially structured-writing and clarity-editing).
• NOT for fiction or narrative craft — use storytelling (the storytelling plugin explicitly defers technical content here).
• NOT for CMS content models or information architecture — use content-modelling.
• NOT for interface text or onboarding copy — use ux-writing.

The five skills inside this plugin are also clearly bounded — see each SKILL.md for its NOT for clause.

Conventions

The plugin follows the skill-foundry house style:

• Each skill description includes a literal NOT for clause for activation discipline.
• Every skill has an anti-patterns block.
• Every skill has both ✅ Use for: and ❌ NOT for: lists in the body.
• References are progressive — SKILL.md is the entry point; reference files cover one topic each.

Author

Viktor Bezdek — https://github.com/viktorbezdek

License

MIT.