Prose Revision Skill Ht Anthony Lee Zhang — Development skill for Claude Code

Prose Revision Skill for Claude

A Claude Skill for revising draft prose — essays, papers, memos, reports — by designing the **reader's path** through the ideas the author already wants to express. Its guiding principle is **idea flow before linguistic flow**.

What It Does

This skill treats revision as designing the route a reader takes through an argument, and treats awkward writing as a symptom of a broken route rather than just bad phrasing. When active, Claude will:

• Walk the reader's path — read the draft sentence by sentence as a reader would, checking what the reader knows and expects at each step
• Diagnose leaps, detours, and backtracking — steps the reader can't make, material that pulls them off course, and places they must reread or reinterpret
• Aim for the shortest reliable path, not the fewest words — sometimes cutting a detour, sometimes adding a bridging sentence the author skipped
• Work at every level — sentence, paragraph, section, and whole — fixing the larger route (paragraph and section order) before rewriting inside paragraphs
• Stay conservative on content — preserve the author's voice, substantive claims, and claim strength (no turning "suggests" into "shows")
• Offer revised versions distinguished by how much they restructure (light, moderate, or full rebuild), with a note on the tradeoff
• Leave well enough alone — if a draft already reads well, say so rather than manufacture edits

This is not proofreading. This skill helps put the structure of a rough draft into shape. Proofreading is a late pass for typos and final copy-editing.

Installation

1. Download this repository as a zip file (click Code → Download ZIP above)
2. In claude.ai, go to Customize → Skills
3. Upload the zip file
4. Confirm the skill appears in your skills list and is toggled on

**Requirement:** Code execution and file creation must be enabled in **Settings → Capabilities**.