The rewrite-plain skill: make anything land on the first read

Read your own website bio out loud. If it has "holistic", "data-driven", "solutions", or "businesses of all sizes" in it, nobody who reads it can picture themselves in it. That's the cost of writing to sound professional.

The rewrite-plain skill runs a clarity pass over anything you've written, whether that's an email, a post, a bio, a sales page, or a doc. It hunts seven specific things: throat-clearing openers, hedging, passive voice that hides who did it, corporate words that mean nothing, verbs turned into nouns, long words doing a short word's job, and the same point made twice in different clothes. Then it rebuilds with the point in the first two lines and one idea per sentence, usually 30 to 50 percent shorter.

It guards your meaning while it does that. Every fact, number, date, name, and claim survives unchanged, and it won't add a promise you didn't make. It's one of the 55 free skills in our freeskills repo.

Claude Code picks up skills from a folder on your machine. Put this one there and it becomes a slash command:

Start a new Claude Code session so it loads the folder, and you're set. That's the whole install. No API keys, no config.

Type /rewrite-plain and paste the text, or give it a file path. It asks one question: who reads this, and what do you want them to do after? That answer sets how hard it can cut. A sales page for strangers and a note to your accountant get different treatment.

Then it looks for your actual point and checks where it's sitting in the original. Usually paragraph two or three, behind the run-up. If it genuinely can't find a point, it stops and asks you what the one thing is, rather than handing you a clean version of an unclear idea.

A good first result: the clean rewrite pasted straight into the reply so you can copy it, the old and new word counts, and three to five before-and-after pairs pulled from your own writing with the move named in two or three words. The full thing saves to ~/rewrites/ with your original kept at the bottom, so nothing gets lost.

Bios collect filler faster than anything else you write. Give it the current one and tell it who's reading.

Works on a draft you already wrote. Tell it what has to survive, especially numbers and caveats.

The before-and-after pairs are the part that changes your writing. Ask for them on something you're proud of.

Here's what it does and why that matters, short enough to say on camera.

1. 1Hook: there's a brand-new free Claude skill that takes you from a 44-word bio nobody understands to 26 words that sound like a person.
2. 2Mechanism: you paste the text in and say who's reading it. It finds the point you were actually making, cuts seven specific kinds of filler, rebuilds the thing around that point, then checks that nothing true got lost in the cutting. You get the rewrite, the new word count, and the pattern behind every change so you start catching it yourself.
3. 3Transformation: people reply faster because they understood you the first time. And after a few runs you start catching the filler yourself, before it's on the page.
4. 4Close: free, and it's one of 55 in the repo. If you want the whole path from a first build to a first customer, that's Claude Code Club, $9 a month. Link below.

Go and get your website bio right now and run it through. It's the shortest thing you own and the one that's read most. Fifteen minutes, and you'll spot the same words in everything else you've written.