writing-shape: Turning Raw Material into an Article, Paragraph by Paragraph

Skill Overview

writing-shape is a Claude writing skill that turns a pile of raw material into an article, paragraph by paragraph. You provide the material; it determines the structure and sequence, then writes one paragraph at a time while confirming each step with you.

Use Cases

1. You have all the material, but it is not yet an article. You may have an interview transcript, a pile of fragmented notes, a podcast transcript, or a rambling draft. You have already done the hardest part of writing—figuring out what you want to say. What remains is turning it into something people can read, and that is exactly where writing-shape takes over.

2. The material is good, but the order is scattered. The ideas are all there, but you do not know which one to present first. This skill first confirms what readers already know when they enter the article, then determines the order of the paragraphs accordingly, avoiding the kind of reading difficulty that arises when a later paragraph depends on a concept that was never introduced earlier.

3. You want to control the reader’s cognitive load in a long-form piece. In tutorials, long-form nonfiction, and technical blogs, readers often drop off not because the material is difficult, but because a concept is used before it has been properly introduced. writing-shape treats “grounding concepts” as a hard constraint. Before writing each paragraph, it must first answer: “Is the reader sufficiently prepared to understand this paragraph?”

Core Features

1. Read the entire body of material before starting. The first thing the skill does is read the source material from beginning to end, whether it consists of neatly organized bullet points or a long stream-of-consciousness passage. It will not offer any structural suggestions until it has finished reading, preventing it from hastily deciding on a framework after seeing only the beginning.

2. Establish prerequisite knowledge before deciding on the opening. It works with you to finalize a list of concepts that readers should already understand when they enter the article. This list is the foundation of the entire piece: every concept outside the list must be explained in a paragraph before later paragraphs can refer to it. It then drafts two or three possible openings, each implying a different argumentative direction, for you to choose or combine. Once one is selected, the entire article must serve that opening.

3. Grow the article paragraph by paragraph, saving as you go. Once the opening is settled, the skill advances only one paragraph at a time. The question it asks is: “After hearing the previous paragraph, what does the reader need to hear next?” Each confirmed paragraph is immediately appended to the article file rather than being held back for batch output, so you can see the article take shape at any time. The format of each paragraph also needs justification: whether it should be prose or a list, whether it should use a block quote, and whether it should be presented as a table—all of these choices must make sense in context.

[!NOTE] It is worth knowing the skill’s boundaries in advance: the original source material is read-only to it; it writes only to the article file. If the material lacks an example or piece of evidence, it will tell you exactly where the gap is and ask you to fill it rather than inventing something itself. It is also not responsible for publishing, formatting, or adding platform-specific metadata.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the relationship between writing-shape, writing-fragments, and writing-beats?

The three are different stages in the same writing pipeline. writing-fragments is for exploration: it uses questions to draw ideas out into fragments without worrying about structure. writing-shape and writing-beats are for utilization, and both assume that the pile of source material is fixed. The difference lies in the shape of the output: writing-beats assembles a journey with rhythm, while writing-shape shapes a continuous article. If the material is still in the divergent stage, start with writing-fragments.

What does grounding mean?

It means that every concept in an article must either be understood by the reader before they enter the piece or have appeared in an earlier paragraph. Otherwise, later paragraphs cannot treat it as known. Note that grounding applies to concepts, not words: a paragraph may not contain a single technical term and still assume that the reader understands an unfamiliar idea. When a concept has a name, grounding means explaining both the idea and its name.

Does the source material need to be organized first?

No. The format does not matter. Bullet-point lists, long-form prose, and transcripts can all be given to it directly. The skill makes its judgments after reading the material in full. What you really need is sufficient content in the material: if a section requires an example that is not there, it will clearly say, “This section is missing an example.” At that point, filling the gap is your responsibility.

Will it modify my original source material file?

No. The original source material is read-only for this skill, and the output is written to a separate article file. If you have not specified a save location, it will ask once and remember the path.

Why does it offer only a few openings to choose from?

Because the opening determines the argument, and the argument determines whether each subsequent paragraph needs to exist. Offering two or three openings with different directions is meant to force you to make that decision first, rather than writing two thousand words and only then realizing that the article is actually about something else. Once an opening has been selected, if the later content veers off course, it will point this out and let you choose whether to revise the opening or cut the material that has strayed.

Where is the generated article saved?

You specify the location by default. The skill will ask once and remember the path. Before appending content each time, it rereads the file from disk, so any paragraphs you manually edited between rounds will not be overwritten.