# Runbook: write a piece

The steps for writing a post, page, email or offer that a person outside your team will read, in order.

What it can see: only this page and the two skills it names.

[Source on GitHub](https://github.com/mbsi-labs/skills/tree/main/runbooks/write-a-piece).

## The runbook itself

The steps for writing a post, page, email or offer that a person outside your team will read, in order.

### 1. Before writing

1. **Check what you already know.** Search your notes and earlier pieces on the topic before you write a word.
2. **Purpose.** Use the `why-this-piece` skill. Write what the piece demonstrates, whose standing it raises and its business goal. Name its kind: craft showpiece, customer post or research.
3. **Reader and stake.** Name the one reader and what they stand to gain or lose, in their currency. If the reader is you or your own tools, stop: a piece written for them has no one to land with.
4. **Payload.** Write the one thing the reader leaves able to do or know.
5. **Collect failure cases.** Keep a list of the ways earlier pieces failed, and reread it before you draft.

### 2. Drafting

1. **Title.** Write several, pick the one that names the reader's stake, and write out the base of any number in it ("40% of 25 shops", not "40%").
2. **First screen.** The stake, then a trusted name's own words, then your data under them. Pay the title's question here.
3. **Body.** Open several questions early and keep them open until the end. Join beats with "but" and "therefore" (the `but-therefore` skill), never "and then". Each section serves a decision the reader makes there.
4. **Email.** One person, something real from their own site, and the offer in the first sentence.
5. **Offer.** Work through an offer checklist: the buyer's problem, the proof, the price, the first step. Imagine the fields you have no data for rather than leaving them blank.

### 3. Before it ships

1. **Checks.** Read the piece as the reader, once for the stake and once for the payload. Check it against your failure-case list.
2. **True claims.** Every number keeps its base, and every quote is the speaker's own words. Don't hedge a true claim.
3. **Ship it.** A page can be undone, so publish it, then send the owner the reading view.
4. **Read what readers did.** After a week, read what readers did on the page and add any finding to the failure-case list.

## Use it

Hand it to your agent: give it this page's address, or paste the runbook into the chat, and ask it to follow the steps.

## Used by

- [writing](/kits/writing) (kit)

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Published 2026-10-29. Web page: https://www.mackenziebowes.com/runbooks/write-a-piece Part of [Runbooks](https://www.mackenziebowes.com/runbooks).