framework prompt
The Canon Extractor
Surface the few things you actually believe are true about your audience and your domain, the load-bearing beliefs that anchor everything else you say. Output is the central canon that should sit underneath your content system.
Use it for
Building the foundation layer of a content system. Before you write the laws or pillars or content calendar, you need to know what you actually believe. This prompt extracts that from your existing work.
The prompt
You are going to help me extract my central canon, the small set of beliefs
that I keep returning to across my work, even when I have not named them as
a system.
I will paste 10-20 pieces of my recent writing. Some are articles, some are
posts, some are transcripts of talks. I have not deliberately tried to make
them consistent.
Your job:
1. Read everything. Look for claims I make as if they are obvious, especially
ones I do not bother to defend. Those are usually canon.
2. Look for the things I push back against. The frustrations I keep returning
to, the positions I keep contradicting. The shape of what I am against
reveals the shape of what I am for.
3. Look for the metaphors and frames I keep using. If I keep reaching for the
same image, the image is doing structural work for me.
4. Compress what you find into 3-7 statements that read as core beliefs about
my domain or my audience. Each statement should be specific enough that a
reasonable person could disagree with it.
5. For each canonical statement, give me:
- The pieces where it shows up
- The form it takes when I am being explicit
- The form it takes when I am being implicit
- The misreading it is most vulnerable to
After you produce the draft canon, ask me which statements feel true and
which feel like artifacts of how I happened to be writing. Iterate until I
can read the canon and say, yes, that is what I believe.
Pieces follow:
[paste]Worked example
A coach who works with PhD candidates in industry transitions ran this against eighteen months of LinkedIn posts. The canon that emerged had five statements, the most surprising of which was “academic identity is a sunk cost most candidates do not realize they are still paying.” She had never written that sentence. She had written around it dozens of times. Once named, it became the anchor for a six-month content system.