A master orator and persuasion skill for Claude Code.
Peitho makes prose pull a reader in and hold them there, end to end, without lying to them. Named for the Greek goddess of persuasion.
Pull is participation. A reader stays because you have given them something to do.
Aristotle built persuasion on the enthymeme, an argument that omits a premise so the audience supplies it. Loewenstein found in 1994 that curiosity requires a visible gap, and dies at both zero knowledge and complete knowledge. Heritage & Greatbatch analyzed 476 real political speeches and found seven rhetorical formats drew about 70% of all applause, every one of them a structure that opens a slot for the audience to close.
Two thousand three hundred years apart, three traditions on the same point. Withhold everything and there is no gap to see. Explain everything and there is no slot left.
Governs prose at three levels:
- Line. Concreteness calibrated to an inverted U. Rhetorical figures welcome, at no comprehension cost. Complexity permitted. Contractions by default, because full forms are a register and not a correctness standard.
- Passage. Every paragraph closes one gap and opens another. This is the hold engine.
- Piece. Three exordium jobs at the door. Tension arc as hygiene. Every gap closed by the end.
Openings get their own module, not because they are a separate discipline but because 55% of pageviews get under 15 seconds of attention, so that is where the same rules carry the most weight. Closings get one because memory peaks there: across 174 effect sizes, retrospective evaluation is dominated by the peak and the end (r = .581). That module is a method, not a standard. List the open gaps, cut upward to the last true sentence, land on the concrete, then test the last line with no context around it.
The pass that targets what a language model produces by default, rather than bad writing in general.
| Tell | Rule |
|---|---|
| Em-dashes as a rhythm crutch | Zero under 500 words. Two per 1,000 above it |
| "It's not X, it's Y" | Banned, including "the question isn't X, it's Y" |
| No contractions | Contract unless stress, normative text, characterization, or clarity |
| Reflexive caveats | Delete the hedge. If the sentence stays true, the hedge was posture |
| Process narration | Prose describes its subject, never its own construction |
| Restatement | Repeat a term, never restate a point. Includes the reflex that puts everything in threes |
| Sycophantic openers | Start with the answer |
Two more surfaces sit behind that. coherence.md is the maintainer: term ledger, claim ledger, given-new ordering, locked person and tense, callback integrity. It runs as a separate pass over finished text, mandatory past roughly 2,000 words, because a model's grip on its own earlier prose degrades with distance. fiction.md carries the delta for stories, including the one narrow em-dash exception the law allows, for interrupted dialogue.
It contradicts most hook advice in circulation, with citations. Five widely repeated rules are buried in references/myths.md, including "withhold the outcome to build suspense" (spoiled stories were enjoyed more, across three genres) and "follow the arc and readers will come" (roughly 40,000 narratives, no relationship to popularity).
Every claim carries an evidence tier. [M] meta-analytic, [E] single strong study, [C] correlational, [L] craft lore, [?] encountered secondhand and unverified. Lore is allowed. Lore dressed as science is not.
The ethics rail is derived, not decorative. Transported readers detect fewer flaws in what they read. The technique measurably lowers a reader's scrutiny, so the rail is part of the technique. Fabricating a concrete detail is a blocking rule, because concreteness is exactly what this skill rewards.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
SKILL.md |
The procedure |
references/evidence.md |
The corpus, tiered and cited |
references/orators.md |
Real openings reverse-engineered. Read this to imitate rather than guess |
references/myths.md |
The buried advice |
references/ethics.md |
The honest-persuasion rail |
references/forms.md |
Exit speed and audience stance calibration |
references/scorecard.md |
The 0 to 5 rubric |
references/deslop.md |
Banned words, banned patterns, the em-dash law, the contraction default |
references/tells.md |
The machine-prose tells, ranked, with the four laws that kill them |
references/coherence.md |
The maintainer, and the pass that runs it |
references/fiction.md |
The fiction delta |
design.md |
Doc of record |
As a plugin, which keeps it updated in place:
/plugin marketplace add Pr1m4lc0d3/peitho
/plugin install peitho@peitho
By hand:
git clone https://github.com/Pr1m4lc0d3/peitho
cp -r peitho ~/.claude/skills/SKILL.md and references/ are the whole skill. Everything else in the repo is source material.
For local development there is deploy-skill.ps1, which stages and copies in one step. Pass
-SkipDeploy to validate without installing.
Narrative persuasion effects are real and modest, around r = .17 to .23. No structural formula predicts success. Peitho is an engineered procedure assembled from evidenced components: the components are cited, the assembly is a construction.
Deliberon is a Windows desktop app that runs a council of AI agents on a hard decision and hands back a Decision Record: dissent preserved, every claim marked as proved, asserted, or estimated.
Peitho is the prose method behind its writing, published in full because a persuasion technique you cannot inspect is one you cannot defend against.
Pay once, it's yours, no subscription. Thirty days of the full council with no account and no card. Runs on your machine with your own model keys.