A skill for Claude and other SKILL.md-compatible agents that improves the documents that you generated by applying a simple set of guidelines about effective business communication.
When Claude drafts a proposal, memo, or deck without guidance, the result tends to bury the ask, open with context instead of conclusions, over-format everything, and look unmistakably AI-generated. Even if the document is accurate (check york work!) it often isn't effective, since it may share the traits of the generic, unfocused output that plagues most business communication.
This skill addresses the issue by ensuring that you start from a better baseline. These improvements can happen upon initial creation, or at later review.
Two modes:
Generate — fires when you ask Claude to write a deck, memo, proposal, or report. Applies five communication principles and overrides Claude's (now-cliché) default visual style and asks about your brand before touching anything visual.
Review — fires when you ask Claude to review or improve an existing document. Runs five named passes and produces a structured report with severity levels (CRITICAL / MAJOR / MINOR), along with a list of specific suggested fixes.
- Audience and Purpose — buried ask, author-centered opening, missing stakes
- Structure and Sequencing — creation-order docs, murder mystery structure, key info in speaker notes
- Formatting Restraint — emphasis overload, decorative underlines, color proliferation, filler visuals
- Wayfinding and Density — no orientation, unsummarized data, unanswerable questions, dense prose
- Naming and Versioning — generic titles, recipient-first naming,
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npx skills add github:anildash/better-documentsOr copy SKILL.md into your project root.
Once installed, the skill fires automatically when you make relevant requests, which could look something like this:
Write a proposal for migrating our analytics stack to BigQuery.
Review this deck before I send it to the board.
Quick look — does this memo make sense?
No extra prompting needed. The skill's description is written to trigger on generation requests ("write," "create," "draft") and review requests ("review," "look at this," "does this work").
This skill covers business documents: presentations, slide decks, proposals, reports, memos, briefs, one-pagers, and emails.
It does not cover UI, web components, or frontend applications; this isnt for web apps or sites. Business document design has different goals and rules than a web app or marketing site, favoring restraint over expression, skimmability, and familiarity of format.
This tool is based on my blog post Make better documents, from March 2024, which many people said they found useful. Now these suggestions have been translated from advice for humans into into instructions that an AI agent can follow.
SKILL.md— the skill itselfdocument-design.md— the source guidelines in distilled form, useful as standalone referenceBLOG-NOTES.md— notes on the thinking behind this skill