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Add winston-coach to Communication & Writing

@Anastasios3✓ 3 checkschecks…add-winston-coach → master1 files · +1 −0updated 3w ago

▸Description

Adds winston-coach — a Claude skill that applies Patrick Winston's framework from MIT's "How to Speak" lecture and his book Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform to any writing or speaking task.

What it does

14 Winston tools: Empowerment Promise, VSN-C structure (Vision-Steps-News-Contributions), Winston's Star (Symbol-Slogan-Surprise-Salient-Story), the four engagement heuristics, slide hygiene, six standard openings for written work, the abstract checklist, broken-glass outline, surface clues for skimmers, plus format-specific guidance.
Routes by format: talks, decks, reports, memos, emails, blog posts, pitches, recommendation letters, abstracts, press releases, papers, more.
Mandatory humanizer pass on every written output — strips em-dash overuse, AI vocabulary, copula avoidance, synonym cycling, fake parallelisms, the usual tells.
Eats its own dog food: the skill content itself avoids the patterns it strips.

Why it might be useful Winston's "How to Speak" has ~19M views on YouTube and is widely cited but rarely applied consistently. Packaging the framework as a Claude skill means it auto-applies on every writing or speaking task without having to re-read the source. The skill also corrects several common popularization errors (e.g., "salient" means sticks out, not important; the book co-author is Karen Prendergast not "Prensky"; the book was finished by Winston himself in 2020, not posthumously by someone else).

Repo: https://github.com/Anastasios3/winston-coach License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Working SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter: yes Author: @Anastasios3

Happy to adjust the entry placement or wording if needed.

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