Condensing a Grant to the Page Limit Agent Skill

Cut a grant proposal down to a page or word limit — identify sections and sentences to remove, then tighten remaining prose sentence by…

Context cost
1.9k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 7.8 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Cut a grant proposal down to a page or word limit — identify sections and sentences to remove, then tighten remaining prose sentence by sentence without losing substance. Use whenever a draft runs over a page or word limit, the user says it is too long, needs to fit NIH/NSF page constraints or a foundation word cap, or asks to shorten, trim, condense, or cut a proposal or section after assembling separately drafted parts. Works section by section or across the whole document.

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.

productivity

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.md7.8 kB · preview
--- name: grant-condense ---
6# Condensing a Grant to the Page Limit
7
8Sections drafted independently almost always overrun when assembled — each was written to be complete on its own, so the assembled draft carries redundancy no single author saw. Cutting is not damage control; a tight proposal reads as disciplined thinking, and reviewers reading their tenth application reward density. The goal is to lose length, not substance.
9
10Read _agent/project-config.md first (page limit, mechanism, document format). Measure against the *formatted* document, not a word count — page limits are a property of the compiled PDF at the required font/margins, so verify the real overage first (coordinate with grant-format-check). In practice: for LaTeX, compile in the sandbox and count pages; for Word, ask the user for the formatted page count. Only if neither is possible, estimate words-per-page calibrated against the user's own document (count words on a known full page), never a generic constant. Word-limited sections (common at foundations) are measured directly by word count. Font, margin, and spacing manipulation is out of scope — it is mostly prohibited and belongs to grant-format-check; length must come out of the text. Cut a checkpoint before starting — condensing removes text the PI may want back, which is exactly the rollback case the checkpoint policy names — then edit the working copy. Record any content the user decides to drop entirely in _agent/decision-log.md, because a cut aim or dropped analysis often needs to disappear from the abstract, budget, and timeline too — and add a ripple item to _agent/tracker.md for each document the cut touches, so the propagation is worked from the tracker rather than remembered. Tightened prose must still read as the PI's: apply _agent/style-profile.md to every rewritten sentence — condensing is where a model's default register (em-dash compression, stacked adjectives) most often replaces the author's — and check the result against the profile's *Directives* list before delivering it (shared convention 5).
11
12## Step 0 — Quantify the gap and set a target
13
14State the overage concretely ("Research Strategy is 13.6 pages; limit 12 — roughly 1.6 pages, ~13%, to remove"). Knowing whether the task is a 3% trim or a 25% cut determines the approach: small overages come from sentence-level tightening alone; large ones require structural cuts first. Do the biggest, cheapest cuts before the fine work — there is no point polishing a paragraph that should be deleted.
15
16## Step 1 — Structural cuts (largest yield, do first)
17
18Read the whole document (or section) and find length that can leave with the least loss:
19
20- **Redundancy across sections** — the dominant source of overrun. Background restated in Significance and again opening the Approach; a method described where it is introduced and again where it is used; the central hypothesis re-explained in every aim. Consolidate to one authoritative statement and cross-reference. Flag each with both locations and the recommended single home.
21- **Over-explained routine methods** — established techniques described in protocol detail. Cite the method and state only what is nonstandard or critical. Reviewers assume competence in standard technique; spend the page budget on what is new or risky.
22- **Low-yield content** — tangential background, over-hedged caveats, preliminary data figures that de-risk nothing the reviewer doubted, an aim or sub-aim that carries less weight than its length. Removing a weak aim is a strategic decision for the user, not a mechanical cut — surface it with the trade-off, do not delete it unilaterally.
23- **Figures and tables** — each should earn its footprint; oversized figures and figures duplicating what the text already says are reclaimable space. Note that shrinking a figure can violate the font-size floor (coordinate with grant-format-check), so removal usually beats shrinking.
24
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md1,217 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.

≈130
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
1,820
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
0.97%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 10% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

1.9k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Middling. Fine to keep on in a project where you use it weekly, worth unloading in one where you never do.

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

  • SKILL.md7.8 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.

# Condensing a Grant to the Page Limit · 1.9k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit ] || { mv .claude/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add joshua-d-campbell/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit

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/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit/ 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/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit/ 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 grant-condense in Gemini CLI, Codex, Copilot and Grok (its own name); Claude Code lists it by the folder name, condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit.

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
Versionnot versioned
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencejoshua-d-campbell/condensing-a-grant-to-the-page-limit

Versions

Its author publishes no version number, so there is nothing here to pin to: what you install is the folder as it stands today. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

Pinning

Nothing to pin to: this skill carries no version number of its own. What you install is what the folder holds on the day you install it.

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