Build backward from the one effect.
Writing is engineering, not weather.
A writing-method skill for Claude. It applies Poe's argument from The Philosophy of Composition (1846) as a working discipline: a piece should be built backward from the single effect it is meant to leave in the reader, with every choice — length, tone, image, staging — justified by that effect and nothing else. Name the keystone first; pull it and the piece falls.
It governs structure, not voice. It will not make your writing sound like Poe, or like anyone but you.
- Compose — build a new piece through nine ordered decisions (effect → length → province → tone → keynote → vehicle → climax-first → staging → undercurrent), each constraining the next.
- Diagnose — run the nine backward against an existing draft: infer the effect it actually produces, name the gap from the one you intended, and report the breaks ranked by what they cost that effect.
Ask Claude to compose something, or hand it a draft that isn't landing:
- "Compose a 120-word open for a talk on X. Effect: the audience feels the problem is theirs, not abstract."
- "Diagnose this LinkedIn post — it reads competent but forgettable."
effect-first/
├── SKILL.md # the method: Compose + Diagnose, nine decisions, pre-delivery pass
└── references/
├── worked-examples.md # one full Compose + one full Diagnose, end to end
└── formats.md # how the nine decisions bend across poem / essay / post / email / landing page / talk / eulogy
Any voice or house-style gate. Effect-first fixes the structure; a voice skill (e.g. voice-writer, avoid-ai-writing) fixes the register. The two concerns are separable on purpose.
The nine questions come from Poe; his own answers (melancholy, beauty, a dead woman, a hundred lines) were his, made in 1846, and one has aged badly. The sequence transfers; the answers are examples. Effect-first is a design method, not a warrant for manipulation — it serves writing meant to move a reader, not copy meant to work a mark.
Drop the effect-first/ directory into your Claude skills folder (~/.claude/skills/). No dependencies, no scripts, no network.
CC BY 4.0 — see LICENSE. Created and maintained by Petrichor Projects. Use it, adapt it, ship it; keep the credit.
Awesome-strategy-skills row:
[Effect-First](effect-first/) — Compose or diagnose any piece of writing backward from the single effect it must produce. Poe's composition method as a working discipline.