Drafting

Drafting

Turn claims into sentences. You draft each section yourself, in outline order, no mode selection, no parallel subagents, no review pipeline. The hard rule is claim-first: no prose may cite a claim whose STATUS is still stub. Resolve evidence, then write.

Announce at start: "I'm using the drafting skill to write manuscript prose."

Preconditions

Draft only once outlining has produced:

• .writing/outline.md (approved) and .writing/claims/section_*.md (stub entries per section).
• .writing/metadata.yaml filled (note writing_profile, zotero.enabled, zotero.auto_push_new_citations).
• .writing/manuscript/ exists (from init-writing-dir.sh).

Skip this skill to copy-edit existing prose (use polish) or to verify a finished draft (use claim-verification).

The protocol

Read references/claim-first.md and follow it for every section. It is the load-bearing doorway to the rest of the writing references, so read it before your first section. In short, per section:

1. Resolve evidence first (Step A). For each STATUS: stub claim, resolve its source Zotero-first, then via superpower-writing:literature / superpower-writing:citations as fallback. Advance to evidence_ready. No prose until every claim in the section is resolved.
2. Write LaTeX prose (Step B). Tag each load-bearing paragraph % claim: id (or % draft-only) at column 0. Never invent citekeys.
3. Bookkeeping (Step C). Quick self-read, update .writing/progress.md, commit. The exhaustive mechanical sweep is claim-verification's job, not a gate to rebuild here.

Writing standards (read as guidance, not gates)

• Per-section shape. For each section read the matching references/section-standards/<slug>.md (resolve by slug-ending). It describes paragraph shape, required structural tags, tense and length. Treat it as guidance that refines references/writing-principles.md; if it genuinely conflicts with the outline, surface the conflict rather than silently picking one.
• Terminology ledger. Before the first section, build the canonical-term table from ../_shared/core/terminology-ledger.md: one name per thing across sections. Surface collisions and let the user pick; never coin a name to fill a gap.
• Style cautions. Read references/style-cautions.md before writing any section intro, overview paragraph, or thesis sentence, and clear its scans.
• Systems papers. When metadata.yaml has writing_profile: systems, read references/systems-evidence-contract.md for structured analysis/artifact evidence and the Results/Discussion boundary.

Figures

Figures are their own tasks, not inlined into a prose section. Dispatch per type and \input/\includegraphics the result:

• Structural (architecture / flowchart / pipeline / timeline) → superpower-writing:tikz-figures.
• Data plots (bars / scaling / heatmap / cost curves) → superpower-writing:scientific-visualization.
• Image-model raster figures (design exploration with several layout drafts, pictorial concept art, a graphical abstract, or whenever the user prefers a polished PNG) → superpower-writing:scientific-schematics. The prose paragraph that introduces a figure still carries a % claim: id tag for the claim it supports; figure files themselves carry no claim tags. See references/figures-and-tables.md.

After drafting

Hand the manuscript to superpower-writing:claim-verification (mechanical evidence + citation check), then superpower-writing:polish (prose quality).

Key principles

Claim-first, always. Evidence before prose is the plugin's central discipline, not an optional gate. If drafting ever feels fast because you skipped evidence resolution, the gap resurfaces at claim-verification and you redo the work.

You draft inline. A strong model writes the sections directly. There is no orchestration to configure and no subagent to dispatch, the value here is the discipline and the standards, not a pipeline.

Locked-term renames cross the prose/spec boundary. If a rename touches a term already locked in .writing/progress.md, outline.md, or prior drafted prose, do not apply it as a single-file edit. Grep every .writing/manuscript/*.tex, outline.md, and findings.md, update them together, and record the rename in findings.md so the audit trail survives.

Define terms before use. When .writing/glossary.md is present, do not use a term before its declared definition section; fix by moving the % define: <id> or reordering sections.