pitch

writing-skills

A Claude Code plugin marketplace with two plugins: draft, which critiques and tightens prose with a critic built on Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing, and pitch, which develops and stress-tests story pitches.

Installation

Inside a Claude Code session:

Add the marketplace

/plugin marketplace add benjaminjackson/writing-skills

Install draft

/plugin install draft@writing-skills

Install pitch

/plugin install pitch@writing-skills

Confirm the plugins are installed: run /plugin (Installed tab) or /plugin list.

draft

Prose editing built on Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing. One agent, two skills: editor is a critic that judges prose against McCloskey's standards and refuses to rewrite it; critique and tighten both run a document through editor and share the same chunking engine — one just reports, the other applies them.

editor

editor (agent, subagent_type: editor, model: opus, tools: Read) is Deirdre McCloskey herself — economist, rhetorician, author of Economical Writing. Handed a draft, she hunts for fat, throat-clearing, hedges, elegant variation, passive voice that hides who did what, vague abstractions, and cleverness for its own sake. She goes line by line, quotes the offending phrase, names what's wrong, and says what to do: cut, swap, or sharpen.

She has one hard rule: she critiques, she doesn't rewrite. Hand her a request to write or edit prose and she declines and asks for the draft instead.

How it works

editor works best reading a paragraph or two with uncluttered context, so neither skill hands it a whole document at once. Instead each runs editor in two passes: a line-by-line pass, with a separate agent per section-sized chunk, then a single whole-document pass that catches repetition, rhythm, and structure no chunk-level agent can see. editor triages every finding into surgical (preserves meaning: cut padding, weak verb → strong, passive → active, collapse a doublet) or substantive (changes what it says or its shape: delete a list item, merge a section, cut a sentence with a distinct idea). critique and tighten share this process — what differs is what happens after.

critique

Read-only. Runs the document through editor and reports what she finds — no edits, ever. For when you want a second opinion, not a rewrite.

Usage

• Explicitly: /critique <file>
• Automatically: on phrases like "critique this," "how does this read?," "what's wrong with this," "give me notes," or "review this draft."

tighten

Applies the edits. No approval step, no mode to pick — surgical and substantive fixes both apply, as exact find-and-replace. The one thing it holds back: an edit that would flatten a line's emotion or kill a deliberately-built cadence. tighten skips it and names it in the report instead of applying it.

Usage

• Explicitly: /tighten <file>
• Automatically: on phrases like "tighten this," "clean this up," "fix this," "edit this for economy," or "make this leaner."

Both work on one document or a batch — several board policies, a folder of drafts — in one run. Want the notes first and the edits later? Run critique, then tighten once you've seen what it found.

pitch

One agent, two skills: managing-editor gives a single Socratic editorial read; sharpen runs a pitch through managing-editor for a quick verdict; page-one-meeting simulates a multi-persona debate.

managing-editor

managing-editor (agent, model: opus, tools: Read, WebSearch, WebFetch) is a managing editor at a digital-first publication, evaluating pitches by the editorial standards of the NYT, Vox, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker. Socratic, not prescriptive — it asks the questions that help a writer see what's working, rather than handing over a list of fixes.

How it works

Unlike editor, it isn't limited to judging the prose handed to it: WebSearch and WebFetch let it check whether a pitch's claims hold up and whether the angle's already been covered, not just whether the writing works. Name a publication and it pivots to that outlet's editorial voice and priorities; leave it unnamed and it applies standard journalism ethics.

It evaluates a pitch against four questions:

1. Is this newsworthy? — impact, timeliness, proximity, prominence, conflict, novelty, human interest.
2. Does this work as a story? — a specific angle, narrative tension, a human element, a reporting plan.
3. Will this resonate? — audience fit, publication fit, emotional or intellectual stakes.
4. Does this meet our standards? — accuracy, fairness, independence, sourcing, accessibility.

Then it makes the call: green light, revise and resubmit, or kill it — with reasoning, not a hedge.

sharpen