Better Writing Agent Skill

Diagnose and strengthen a piece of writing at the level of narrative structure, not just prose.

Context cost
3.8k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
3 files · 15.0 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
GPL-3.0the author’s own terms
Last change
—no release on file
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Diagnose and strengthen a piece of writing at the level of narrative structure, not just prose. Use this skill whenever the user shares a draft — a short story, chapter, scene, essay, blog post, or any creative or narrative writing — and wants feedback, a critique, an edit, or to make it "less generic," "less AI-sounding," "more original," "more compelling," or "better." Also use it when the user wants to understand why their writing feels flat, formulaic, or predictable, or asks for a structural read rather than a line edit.

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.

contentwriting

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.md7.3 kB · preview
--- name: better-writing ---
6# Better Writing
7
8This skill diagnoses where a draft falls into *default, low-risk storytelling* and proposes concrete structural revisions. It is built on the StoryScope study (Russell et al., 2026), which found that the features most reliably separating human-written from AI-generated fiction are **structural, not stylistic** — and that editing out clichés and purple prose barely changed how generic a story read (a 1.6-point drop in detectability). The genericness lives in the *choices*, not the sentences. So this skill works at the level of choices.
9
10## The core idea: rarity, not a "human score"
11
12The single most important thing to understand before using this skill: the StoryScope models all *converged on the same region* of narrative space. They didn't fail by being individually weird — they failed by all making the same safe, central choices. Human writing scored as more original because it was **rarer**: it took less-common options at each fork (point of view, chronology, how emotion is rendered, whether the ending resolves).
13
14This has a sharp consequence for how to give feedback. **Do not mechanically push a draft toward the "human-elevated" features in the reference table.** If you tell every writer to add a flashback, name a real author, and break the fourth wall, you just manufacture a *new* default cluster — you've moved the writing from one generic center to another. The goal is not to max a checklist. The goal is to help the writer make *intentional, distinctive* choices and to protect what's already idiosyncratic in their voice. The feature table is a map of where defaults live so you can spot them — not a list of moves to install.
15
16## Workflow
17
18### 1. Read the whole draft first, and figure out what it's trying to be
19
20Read it through before saying anything. Identify the form (literary short story, genre fiction, personal essay, argumentative essay, blog post) and what the piece is reaching for — its intended effect, tone, and ambition. A taut, linear thriller and a sprawling literary mosaic have opposite ideals. Many of the "AI-default" features below are *virtues* in the right piece: a clean causal chain is good in a heist story; an explicit moral is the point of a fable. Calibrate every diagnosis to what *this* piece wants to do, not to an abstract average.
21
22### 2. Diagnose against the feature map — but only flag what's load-bearing
23
24Read references/narrative-features.md for the full set of 30 discriminating features with the human-vs-AI gaps. Use it to notice where the draft has reflexively taken the obvious option. But **resist flagging everything** — a critique that lists twenty issues is noise, and most of the gaps are small. Find the three-to-five places where a default choice is actually costing the piece something: where it's flattening tension, foreclosing ambiguity the story wanted, or making the reader feel they've seen this exact move before.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md1,193 words
Files3
LicenceGPL-3.0
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.

≈220
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
3,530
on trigger
The instruction body and 2 supporting files, read only when the skill fires.
1.9%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 19% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

3.8k 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

3 files, 15.0 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md7.3 kB
  • README.md2.7 kB
  • references/narrative-features.md5.0 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 3 files you can review in full before installing. The GPL-3.0 licence covers the templates and examples as well as the instructions.

Install

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

# Better Writing · 3.8k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/better-writing/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/better-writing" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/better-writing ] || { mv .claude/skills/better-writing "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/better-writing" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/better-writing"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add third-sphere/better-writing

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/better-writing/ 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/better-writing/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/better-writing" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/better-writing ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/better-writing "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/better-writing" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/better-writing" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/better-writing/ 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.

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
Referencethird-sphere/better-writing

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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