What these skills are
A second pass on your writing, as installable Claude skills. The first draft is the part that is easy to get help with. The second pass is the one that decides whether anybody finishes reading, and it is the one most drafts never get. This pack is that pass, split across the three levels a draft can fail at.
There is one rule the whole pack is built on: Claude edits, and the judgment about what you meant stays with you. No skill in this set adds an idea you did not have, smooths a hard sentence into a soft one, or touches a quotation, a name or a number. They diagnose the shape and propose a new order, cut what was never carrying weight, and put your own habits back into prose that had lost them. Every reordering comes with its reasoning and every arguable cut is listed, so you can veto it.
Mechanically, each skill is one folder with a SKILL.md file. All three belong to one person: whoever is doing the writing. They work from one Claude Project with a chat per recurring format, and all three read the same house-style.md, so the skills carry the method while that one file carries your taste.
Download all 3 skills. One zip: ready-to-install skill zips, readable SKILL.md files, and the house style the three of them share. Free, no signup. The same three skills are open on GitHub: polar-bear-org/claude-skills.
The 3 skills you get
One skill per level a draft can fail at: the shape, the sentences, the voice.
The shape
1. Structure Doctor
Use when: Every sentence is fine and the whole thing still does not land
Output: A map of what is currently there, where the reader falls off, and a proposed new order with one line of reasoning per move — the buried lede, the sections doing no work, the promise the ending does not keep
The sentences
2. Line Editor
Use when: The draft is in the right order and about a third longer than it needs to be
Output: The edited text, then three to six lines of what changed and why — only the cuts a reasonable writer might argue with, never a full diff
The voice
3. Voice Matcher
Use when: It says what you meant and it reads like a model wrote it
Output: The rewritten text, preceded by the pattern it extracted from your sample — sentence length, contractions, where the emphasis falls — so you can correct its reading of you before it is used
How a draft flows through the pack
On a long piece the order is the one the pack is named for: shape, then sentences, then voice. structure-doctor first, because reordering is cheap and redrafting is not, and there is no point polishing a paragraph that is about to move. line-editor second, once the draft is in the order it will keep. voice-matcher last, on prose that is already the right shape and the right length. On a short piece line-editor alone is usually enough. All three read resources/house-style.md before touching a word — the defaults, the rhythm, and the list of what never gets touched — so editing that file is how you change the way the whole pack writes.
Setup guide
- Download the pack. One zip: an install folder with ready-to-upload skill zips, a skills folder with the same three skills as readable files, and house-style.md in resources.
- Install your skills. In Claude, turn on code execution in Settings, Capabilities, then go to Customize, Skills and upload one zip per skill from the install folder. In Claude Code it is two lines instead: /plugin marketplace add polar-bear-org/claude-skills, then /plugin install editing-pack@polar-bear-skills, and all three load at once.
- Create your Writing Desk. Make one Project called Writing Desk and add house-style.md to its knowledge: all three skills read it before touching a word, so it is where your taste lives. Then keep one chat per recurring format ("Newsletter", "Client memos") and write "run line-editor". Paste the last thing you wrote. It will cut about a fifth of it and tell you which cuts you should argue with.
Where to start
| Your situation | Skill to run |
|---|---|
| Something's off with this doc and you can't say what | Structure Doctor |
| The reader meets the point on page three | Structure Doctor |
| The last thing you wrote, and it needs to be shorter | Line Editor |
| A quick "does this sound okay" | Line Editor |
| This sounds like AI wrote it | Voice Matcher |
| A newsletter that has to sound like you | Voice Matcher |
The quality bar
Every skill in the pack holds the same standard, the one we hold on our own writing:
- Claude edits, the writer judges: the judgment about what you meant stays with you
- Nothing gets added: no skill puts in an idea the writer did not have
- The writer's voice survives the edit: short and blunt stays short and blunt, warm and digressive keeps the warmth
- The imperfections stay: the habits that make someone recognisable are why smoothing them out reads as generated
- Deliberate breaks are craft, not error: a fragment for emphasis or a comma splice that sets a rhythm is left alone
- Quotations, names, figures and anything inside code fences are never touched: an awkward quote stays awkward and gets flagged instead
- No template gets imposed: a decision memo, a launch announcement and an essay have different shapes
- Never in someone else's name: no impersonating a client, a colleague, or a public figure
Who made this
Polar Bear is a people ops consultancy for human-size teams (20 to 200 people). Built by ex-McKinsey founders with a dream to make AI work for People, not instead of them. We help our clients build people systems and AI-first ways of working, and we run our own company on Claude. This pack is the free, self-serve version of how we work.
The pack gives one draft a second pass at a time. When you want your whole team working this way, AI carrying the overhead so people do the thinking, across memos, frameworks, and everyday work, that's what we build with clients.
Meet Alexey. We write a lot at Polar Bear, and the hard part was never the first draft, it was the second pass. Book a 30-minute call · Alexey on LinkedIn