Writing Shape

Writing, exploit: shape raw material into an article, paragraph by paragraph.

307,829 stars 25,903 forksWriting & Content Plugin marketplace

Install

Claude Code plugin
/plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills

The repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Run /plugin afterwards to pick the plugin that includes this skill.

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more)
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill writing-shape
Manual install
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git /tmp/skills
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/skills/skills/in-progress/writing-shape ~/.claude/skills/writing-shape

Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills. Use .claude/skills in a project folder to share a skill with your team.

From the SKILL.md

<what-to-do>

The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material. Treat it as the input pile: anything from a tidy list of fragments to a wall of unstructured prose to a transcript. The format does not matter. Read it end-to-end before doing anything else.

Then run a shaping session that produces a separate article document. This is **exploit**: the exploring is done, the pile is fixed: commit to a structure and mine the pile to fill it. Do not edit the raw material file: it is read-only to this skill.

If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path.

</what-to-do>

<supporting-info>

## The loop

1. **Read the pile.** Read the input file in full. Form a sense of what's in it.
2. **Establish the prerequisites.** Settle with the user what the reader knows walking in: the concepts that are **grounded** from the start. Everything else must be grounded by a block before a later block can lean on it. See [Grounding](#grounding).
3. **Draft 2–3 candidate openings.** Each opening should imply a different thesis or angle for the article. Show all of them. Force the user to pick or compose a hybrid. The chosen opening defines what the rest of the article must do.
Read the full skill on GitHub

Details

Skill name
writing-shape
Path
skills/in-progress/writing-shape/SKILL.md
License
MIT
Repo updated
30 October 2026

FAQ

What does the Writing Shape skill do?

Writing, exploit: shape raw material into an article, paragraph by paragraph.

How do I install the Writing Shape skill?

Claude Code plugin: /plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills. Skills go in ~/.claude/skills (personal) or .claude/skills (project), and Claude loads them automatically when a task matches the description.

Is Writing Shape popular?

It lives in mattpocock/skills, which has 307,829 GitHub stars and 25,903 forks, and is included in 1 curated skill list.

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