Skill: Executive Prose Conventions
Briefs your CRO reads in 60 seconds: facts in tables, reasoning in bullets, the lead in the first line.
Overview
Briefs that read like an executive summary, not a research paper. Claude puts comparable facts in tables, reasoning in one-claim bullets and synthesis in a single 'What this tells you' paragraph, leads with the most important signal, keeps dates exactly as given, and stays inside length budgets for briefs, one-pagers and emails.
Use cases
Pre-call briefs that fit the budget
A pre-call brief stays under 500 words and an account one-pager under 400. When the draft runs long, Claude cuts bullets, not tables, so the facts survive and the padding goes.
Outputs that don't read as AI-generated
No 'In today's fast-paced market', no 'leading provider of' opener, no em dashes. The brief opens with the signal that matters, such as 'Acme is researching BI alternatives', and the reader decides in seconds.
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Executive Prose Conventions
When to use
- Authoring a workflow output template (Markdown one-pager, brief, account plan).
- Reviewing a workflow's "Output format" section for style drift.
HG house style
Tables for facts
Anything that's a comparable, structured fact goes in a table. Examples:
- Technographic stack (product, category, intensity rank, last verified)
- Peer comparison (company, employees, revenue, stack)
- 90-day plan (action, owner, target date, outcome)
Tables compress more facts per square inch than prose can. The reader skims and picks up the signal in seconds. For when a table beats bullets, and how to lay one out, follow tabular-summary-discipline.
Bullets for reasoning
The "why this matters" lines under each header are bullets, not prose. Each bullet is one claim. Two-sentence bullets are fine; full paragraphs in bullet form are a tell that the author should have used prose.
Narrative only in "What this tells you"
A single paragraph of synthesis at the end of a section, prefixed with "What this tells you:" or similar, gives the reader the takeaway. Outside this paragraph, prose is overkill.
Never lead with filler
Do not open with:
- "In today's fast-paced market..."
- "As organizations navigate..."
- "[Company] is a leading provider of..."
Lead with the most important signal. "Acme Corp is researching BI alternatives this month" is a better opening than "Acme Corp is a global leader in industrial technology."
Dates and facts as given
Keep every date as it was given ("Q2 2026", "since 22 Sep"), with its year; don't turn it into relative time ("this month", "recently"). Don't add years, dates, budgets, plans or heuristics the input doesn't state.
Punctuation and case
- No em dashes, in any output. Use commas, colons, periods or parentheses. Don't use en dashes or double hyphens as dashes either; write ranges as "30 to 70" or "30-70".
- Headings in sentence case. Table header rows in Title Case. Everything else in sentence case.
Length budgets
| Output Type | Target Length |
|---|---|
| Pre-call brief | 500 words or fewer |
| Account plan one-pager | 400 words or fewer |
| Outbound email | 120 words or fewer (80 to 120 per humanizer) |
| Section synthesis ("What this tells you") | 80 words or fewer |
If the output overshoots, cut bullets, not tables. Tables compress; bullets pad.
Common pitfalls
- Treating "executive" as "formal". Executives skim; formality slows them down. Direct language wins.
- Padding to hit a length target. A 400-word brief that says everything is better than a 600-word one that repeats.
- Burying the lead. The most important fact goes in the first 50 words.
- Facts in prose. If three or more items share the same attributes, it's a table.
Reference
- Full docs for LLMs: https://phoenix.hginsights.com/docs/llms-full.txt
- Related skills:
tabular-summary-discipline,opening-line-discipline,humanizer,hg-citation-discipline