crafting-portfolio-essayslisted

# Crafting Portfolio Essays ## Overview Most AI writing fails at portfolios because it averages. It produces the median sentence about the topic, in the median voice, with the median structure — and the give-aways are predictable: parallel-structure tricolons in every paragraph, dichotomies of the form *"It is not X — it is Y"*, and closing summaries that restate what was just said. This skill is built to fight all three. The core loop pulls voice **out of the human author rather than guessing it** by asking the author for sample texts that exemplify their voice across three registers (raw / spoken / polished), picks a deliberate **storytelling archetype** for each piece (rather than defaulting to consultant-pyramid), and produces two persistent artifacts: - **`tone-and-soul.md`** — the author's voice fingerprint, with three registers and a curated archetype shelf. Reused across every future essay. - **`essay-spec-{slug}.md`** — per-piece implementation spec the website (or a follow-on Claude session) ships against. ## When to Use Use when: - The author is reviewing a draft and wants editorial sharpening (not just copyedits). - A new portfolio essay is being commissioned and needs a structure before drafting. - Multiple half-finished pieces exist and the voice is drifting between them. - An existing piece needs to be tightened, pull-quoted, and laid out for a magazine-style page. - A new portfolio site doesn't yet have a `tone-and-soul.md`. Do NOT use for: - Mechanica