The Stoop Method
Five disciplined stages, run the same way on every project — so the quality of your copy doesn’t depend on which day you happened to catch the studio.
Why we call it a stoop
A stoop is a falcon’s high-speed, folded-wing dive onto a precisely marked target — not a random attack. It climbs first, so it can see the whole field. Then it commits to one line, with total precision. Then it grips and holds what it caught.
That’s not a metaphor bolted on afterward. It’s the actual shape of how we write: see everything, commit to one line, edit it cold, and hand over only what’s ready to be held.
The five stages
01
Mark
Brief intake, audience and competitor research, voice capture. We identify the target before anything is written: the goal, the reader, the objection, the one action the page needs to produce. Most weak copy fails here — before drafting even starts — because no one wrote down what “good” meant for this project.
02
Mount
Structure and strategy pass: message hierarchy, outline, headline angle, page or email architecture, decided in outline form, not sentence form. Separating structure from prose means a weak line gets caught and fixed in an outline in five minutes, instead of surviving inside a finished paragraph because rewriting it felt like too much work.
03
Stoop
The draft: one committed, full-speed pass, written against the Mount-stage outline. A draft written in one committed line, from a structure already agreed, reads more coherent than one assembled sentence-by-sentence with no map — and it’s faster, which is why we can publish honest turnaround times.
04
Foot
The edit: a separate, colder pass. Line-editing, cutting, verifying every claim against the brief, reading aloud for rhythm — and on bilingual projects, a parity check so the English and French versions carry equal weight, not just equal meaning. Writing and editing are different cognitive modes; doing both in one sitting is how bloated, hedged copy happens.
05
Mantle
Delivery: your review round(s), as scoped in your package, final proofing, and hand-off. Full IP transfers to you on final payment. A falcon mantles — spreads its wings over — what it’s caught, to protect it while it feeds. We use the word the same way: a project doesn’t end at “delivered,” it ends at “actually ready to publish, actually yours.”
What you actually receive, at each stage
- 01 After Mark — A written brief summary you review and approve before drafting starts, so you’re not discovering the direction for the first time in a finished draft.
- 02 After Mount — An outline or structure map (headline angle, section order, message hierarchy) — the point where structural changes are cheapest to make.
- 03 After Stoop — Nothing lands in your inbox yet; this stage happens inside the studio.
- 04 After Foot — The polished draft, ready for your review round.
- 05 After Mantle — Final files, section-mapped and ready to paste into your build, plus written confirmation that IP has transferred.
A good brief is half the work
- Whatever you already have — existing copy, brand guidelines, a positioning doc, even rough notes. We work from what’s real, not from a blank page assumption.
- Access to whoever knows the product or service best, for one structured conversation during the Mark stage.
- One clear decision-maker for the review round(s) — fewer rounds get spent reconciling conflicting feedback.
- For bilingual projects: confirmation of which market is primary, if either is, so the Mount stage can weight the structure correctly.
