Disciplinary Writing Scaffold Agent Skill

Create a writing scaffold teaching the genre conventions specific to an academic discipline.

Context cost
5.3k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 21.0 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Create a writing scaffold teaching the genre conventions specific to an academic discipline. Use when students write lab reports, historical essays, or other discipline-specific text types.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

academic-languagedisciplinary-literacydocumentationgenre-pedagogyscaffoldwriting

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md21.0 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: disciplinary-writing-scaffold disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "literacy-critical-thinking/disciplinary-writing-scaffold" skill_name: "Disciplinary Writing Scaffold" domain: "literacy-critical-thinking" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "strong" evidence_sources: - "Halliday (1993) — Towards a language-based theory of learning" - "Martin & Rose (2008) — Genre Relations: mapping culture" - "Christie & Derewianka (2008) — School Discourse: learning to write across the years of schooling" - "Graham & Perin (2007) — Writing Next: effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents" - "Shanahan & Shanahan (2008) — Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents" input_schema: required: - field: "writing_task" type: "string" - field: "discipline" type: "string" - field: "student_level" type: "string" optional: - field: "genre" type: "string" - field: "student_profiles" type: "array" - field: "assessment_criteria" type: "string" - field: "model_text" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "scaffold" type: "object" - field: "language_toolkit" type: "object" - field: "annotated_model" type: "string" - field: "differentiation" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "argument-structure-scaffold-generator" - "vocabulary-tiering-tool" - "academic-language-sentence-frame-generator" - "text-complexity-analyser" - "pedagogical-content-knowledge-developer" - "critical-thinking-task-designer" teacher_time: "3 minutes" tags: ["disciplinary-literacy", "writing", "genre-pedagogy", "scaffold", "academic-language"] ---
72# Disciplinary Writing Scaffold
73
74## What This Skill Does
75
76Produces a scaffold for a specific disciplinary writing genre — a lab report, a historical argument, a literary analysis, a mathematical explanation, a geographical case study — that reflects the actual conventions of that discipline rather than applying a generic "essay structure." Each discipline has its own way of constructing knowledge through writing: scientists write to report and explain phenomena through evidence; historians write to interpret and argue about significance; literary critics write to analyse authorial craft and effect. A science scaffold that looks like an English essay scaffold has failed. The output includes the structural scaffold, a discipline-specific language toolkit (vocabulary, sentence starters, hedging language, connectives), an annotated model, and differentiation options. AI is specifically valuable here because most teachers are experts in their discipline's content but not its writing conventions — they know what good disciplinary writing looks like but struggle to make its features explicit and teachable.
77
78## Evidence Foundation
79
80Halliday (1993) and the systemic functional linguistics tradition established that language is not a neutral container for content — different disciplines use language differently because they construct knowledge differently. Science writing uses nominalisation (turning processes into things: "the water evaporated" becomes "evaporation"), passive voice, and hedging language because these features serve scientific purposes (objectivity, precision, tentativeness). Historical writing uses evaluative language, causal connectives, and qualification because historians construct arguments about significance. Martin & Rose (2008) mapped the genres used across school disciplines, showing that each subject requires students to write in multiple genres with distinct structural and linguistic features. Christie & Derewianka (2008) demonstrated that students' ability to write in disciplinary genres develops across schooling and requires explicit instruction — students do not naturally acquire the language features of scientific or historical writing just by reading examples. Graham & Perin (2007) found that explicit teaching of text structures is one of the most effective writing interventions (effect size 0.82). Shanahan & Shanahan (2008) argued that literacy instruction must become increasingly discipline-specific as students progress — generic reading and writing strategies are insufficient for advanced disciplinary learning.
81
82## Input Schema
83
84The teacher must provide:
85- **Writing task:** What students must write. *e.g. "Write a conclusion for the enzyme experiment" / "Explain why the Weimar Republic failed" / "Analyse how Shakespeare presents Lady Macbeth in Act 1, Scene 5" / "Explain why your answer to the problem is correct"*
86- **Discipline:** The subject area. *e.g. "Science (Biology)" / "History" / "English Literature" / "Mathematics"*
87- **Student level:** Year group and writing competence. *e.g. "Year 8, can write in paragraphs but their science writing reads like storytelling — 'we put the enzyme in and then it fizzed'"*
88
89Optional (injected by context engine if available):
90- **Genre:** The specific genre (if known)
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,858 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈770
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
4,480
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.6%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 26% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

5.3k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 21.0 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md21.0 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Disciplinary Writing Scaffold · 5.3k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2 ] || { mv .claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2 "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2 ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2 "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where. It appears as disciplinary-writing-scaffold in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/disciplinary-writing-scaffold-2

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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