A Red Pen
Craft is caring enough to get the details right.
Matthew Butterick argues this for typography in Practical Typography. Reader attention is finite. Every typographic choice you make either earns it or loses it.
Readers judge your typography before they read a word. That’s how they decide whether it’s worth their time.
Butterick made the case for typography. Orwell made it for prose in Politics and the English Language: no stale metaphors, short words over long ones, cut anything you can cut, active voice, no jargon, and break any rule rather than write something ugly.
They’re different disciplines, but with the same instinct: sweat the details and respect the reader. These rules aren’t hard to follow themselves, but doing them consistently, on everything you publish, is.
So I built an agent skill that runs in Claude Code and Cowork.
Agent skills are folders of instructions and resources that agents can discover to do things well (like editing).
It’s a red pen.
It checks my drafts against the craft rules I set and shows me where I need to tighten up.
I care about this because craft compounds. Sloppy writing erodes trust one post at a time. The red pen has made my writing better. Maybe it’ll help yours too.