the-craft

You've seen it. The marketing email that sounds like it was drafted by a risk assessment team. The landing page where every sentence has been sanded down to offend absolutely no one. The tagline that went through six rounds of feedback and emerged as something nobody would ever

It is not to introduce the topic. It is not to set context. It is not to welcome the reader or explain what they're about to learn. A first line has one job: make them read the second line. That's it. The entire mandate. And most

The first draft is not the point. It never was. I have been cutting other people's copy for years — the long sentences that say nothing, the paragraphs that warm up before saying the thing they meant to say three sentences earlier, the opening that apologizes for existing before